Microsoft Teams is having a moment — a Coronavirus moment.
The company has seen a massive 775% increase in use of its cloud services in areas with social distancing or shelter in place orders, which is much of the U.S., India, China, Canada, plus multiple European nations and more.
A Microsoft building with the company’s logo
Photo by Mohammad Rezaie on Unsplash
Microsoft Teams now has more than 44 million daily users, and they generated over 900 million meeting and calling minutes, corporate VP for Microsoft 365 Jared Spataro said today in a blog post.
We are hard at work providing services to support hundreds of millions of people who rely on Microsoft to stay connected and to work and play remotely.
In addition, Windows Virtual Desktop usage ballooned “more than 3X,” he said.
As of March 20, 58% of American knowledge workers were working at home, an unprecedented proportion. That’s resulted in Californians and New Yorkers driving 48% less, and other states cutting their commutes significantly as well. And it means cloud services demand is off the charts.
Just last week Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield tweeted that his company has added 9,000 next new customers and hit more than 12.5 million simultaneously connected users.
Slack’s not specifically a work from home tool, Butterfield said, calling it “more of a ‘create organizational agility’ tool.” But I’ve used it to work remotely for the better part of a decade, and like Microsoft Teams, it enables people and teams to work together even when spread across the globe … or a city.
Zoom, of course, is also way up in usage, as are news, gaming, and e-commerce.
Microsoft has maintained a fairly admirable level of service given the massive 77% increase in usage, with no “significant’ disruptions, but will be prioritizing emergency services usage and paid user on a go-forward basis, Spataro said.
“We’re implementing a few temporary restrictions designed to balance the best possible experience for all of our customers. We have placed limits on free offers to prioritize capacity for existing customers. We also have limits on certain resources for new subscriptions.”
In addition, Microsoft is adding new capacity as quickly as possible.