Coronavirus Pandemic, Microsoft's Cloud Services Experienced 775% increase In Usage

28/03/2020

Since the coronavirus has been declared a pandemic, governments and companies are urging people to stay at home and work from home.

With productivity simply shifted from the office and elsewhere to people's home, Microsoft revealed “a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders”.

And because of that, the company is “expediting the addition of significant new capacity that will be available in the weeks ahead”.

But this sudden surge is just too much for Microsoft, as it already imposed some quotas to cope with the huge demand for its cloud.

Over the weekend, the software giant issued “Update #2 on Microsoft cloud services continuity” that revealed the statistic, and the company’s plans to keep its cloud and customers running during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Related: Facebook, Netflix And YouTube Struggle To Keep Up With The Coronavirus Pandemic 'Side Effects'

Microsoft data center
Credit: Microsoft

On its blog post, Microsoft said that:

"Since last week’s update, the global health pandemic continues to impact every organization—large or small—their employees, and the customers they serve. Everyone is working tirelessly to support all our customers, especially critical health and safety organizations across the globe, with the cloud services needed to sustain their operations during this unprecedented time. Equally, 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."

The company also said that it's experiencing "a very significant spike in Teams usage, and now have more than 44 million daily users," with users generating "over 900 million meeting and calling minutes on Teams daily in a single week."

Microsoft also revealed that its Windows Virtual Desktop usage has grown more than 3 times, and governments' use of public Power BI to share COVID-19 dashboards with citizens has surged by 42% in a week.

The team at Microsoft Azure is certainly busy, despite knowing that the sudden surge is something that is expected during this kind of case.

"The surge in use over the last week, we have experienced significant demand in some regions (Europe North, Europe West, UK South, France Central, Asia East, India South, Brazil South) and are observing deployments for some compute resource types in these regions drop below our typical 99.99 percent success rates."

But still, the company has not experienced any significant service disruption.

If for any reason users experience allocation failures, Microsoft encouraged its customers to retry deployments. Microsoft also said that it has a process in place to ensure that customers that encounter repeated issues receive relevant mitigation options.

"We treat these short-term allocation shortfalls as a service incident and we send targeted updates and mitigation guidance to impacted customers via Azure Service Health—as per our standard process for any known platform issues."

“Concurrently, we monitor support requests and, if needed, encourage customers to consider alternative regions or alternative resource types, depending on their timeline and requirements," Microsoft added.

"If the implementation of these efforts to alleviate demand is not sufficient, customers may experience intermittent deployment related issues. When this does happen, impacted customers will be informed via Azure Service Health."

Previously, Facebook revealed that it has doubled the server capacity for its messaging apps after seeing users' messaging activities "increase over 50% and time in group calling (calls with three or more participants) increase by over 1,000% during the last month."