Microsoft Teams Traffic in Italy Surges 775 Percent Amid Coronavirus WFH Shift

UPDATE: The company has corrected the blog post to clarify the 775 percent increase only pertains to use of Microsoft Teams in one country: Italy.  "We have seen a 775 percent increase in Teams' calling and meeting monthly users in a one month period in Italy, where social distancing or shelter in place orders have been enforced," the blog post now reads. 

Original story:
Microsoft reports a stunning 775 percent increase in the company’s cloud service, Azure, due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

The seven-fold jump in traffic is occurring in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter-in-place orders to combat the illness.

As a result, the company has been scrambling to minimize service disruptions to Azure, which runs both Microsoft Office and Xbox Live services, in addition to internet websites from third-party clients. 

“Despite the significant increase in demand, we have not had any significant service disruptions,” Microsoft said in a blog post over the weekend.

Nevertheless, Redmond concedes Azure is sometimes failing to reach the 99.9 percent success rate in deploying needed cloud resources for clients. 

Azure also counts hospitals and medical services among its clients.

So Microsoft has been prioritizing eliminating any service disruptions related to first responders, medical suppliers, and health-related chatbots and apps.  

To reduce the strain on Azure, Microsoft is instituting some temporary restrictions on network bandwidth.

This includes slowing down video game download speeds on Xbox, which the company previously alluded to last Tuesday.

Normal game download speeds will only be restored late at night. 

The company is also making some tweaks to Microsoft Teams, the company’s alternative to the messaging app Slack, which has also seen a spike in usage.

Teams now has more than 44 million daily users, up from 20 million back in November.

To ensure it’s running smoothly, Microsoft said: “We made a few temporary adjustments to select non-essential capabilities such as how often we check for user presence, the interval in which we show when the other party is typing, and video resolution.”

Still, reports indicate that Microsoft will increase the maximum number of people allowed in a given team from 5,000 to 10,000 over the next two months.

In the coming weeks, the company also plans on adding new capacity to Azure.

“Although the majority of deployments still succeed, (so we encourage any customers experiencing allocation failures to retry deployments), we have a process in place to ensure that customers that encounter repeated issues receive relevant mitigation options,” the company added.  

Microsoft’s Azure is the world’s second largest cloud infrastructure provider behind Amazon’s AWS, according to Canalys.  

UPDATE: The company has corrected the blog post to clarify the 775 percent increase only pertains to use of Microsoft Teams in one country: Italy.  "We have seen a 775 percent increase in Teams' calling and meeting monthly users in a one month period in Italy, where social distancing or shelter in place orders have been enforced," the blog post now reads. 

Original story:
Microsoft reports a stunning 775 percent increase in the company’s cloud service, Azure, due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

The seven-fold jump in traffic is occurring in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter-in-place orders to combat the illness.

As a result, the company has been scrambling to minimize service disruptions to Azure, which runs both Microsoft Office and Xbox Live services, in addition to internet websites from third-party clients. 

“Despite the significant increase in demand, we have not had any significant service disruptions,” Microsoft said in a blog post over the weekend.

Nevertheless, Redmond concedes Azure is sometimes failing to reach the 99.9 percent success rate in deploying needed cloud resources for clients. 

Azure also counts hospitals and medical services among its clients.

So Microsoft has been prioritizing eliminating any service disruptions related to first responders, medical suppliers, and health-related chatbots and apps.  

To reduce the strain on Azure, Microsoft is instituting some temporary restrictions on network bandwidth.

This includes slowing down video game download speeds on Xbox, which the company previously alluded to last Tuesday.

Normal game download speeds will only be restored late at night. 

The company is also making some tweaks to Microsoft Teams, the company’s alternative to the messaging app Slack, which has also seen a spike in usage.

Teams now has more than 44 million daily users, up from 20 million back in November.

To ensure it’s running smoothly, Microsoft said: “We made a few temporary adjustments to select non-essential capabilities such as how often we check for user presence, the interval in which we show when the other party is typing, and video resolution.”

Still, reports indicate that Microsoft will increase the maximum number of people allowed in a given team from 5,000 to 10,000 over the next two months.

In the coming weeks, the company also plans on adding new capacity to Azure.

“Although the majority of deployments still succeed, (so we encourage any customers experiencing allocation failures to retry deployments), we have a process in place to ensure that customers that encounter repeated issues receive relevant mitigation options,” the company added.  

Microsoft’s Azure is the world’s second largest cloud infrastructure provider behind Amazon’s AWS, according to Canalys.