Eventually I read on a forum somewhere[1] that you could partly trick the system by temporarily closing your account and re-opening it, which got you a slightly larger 25MB. But still not the promised 250.
All this 2-4MB for existing accounts, 25MB for new accounts, and years-long rollout to 250MB gave the impression that finding spare storage was a huge struggle for Microsoft. Then a few months later they were having to compete with Gmail and they decided that everyone should get 2GB, which was rolled out to every Hotmail account including mine all at once! I can only assume aliens landed and delivered a UFO full of hard drives.
[1] Here's an example of an old forum post about the trick - complete with reply praising the brand new GMail: https://bimmersport.co.nz/topic/5232-hotmail-upgrade-2mb-to-...
If only they knew...
I'm not excusing EA but I have worked on plenty of complicated microservice systems and it's not always so straight forward to change the structure of data in one place.
The third level of complication is to support China.