Microsoft has recognized a huge increase in demand for its cloud services in this period of forced home confinement linked to the Coronavirus pandemic. In Italy the company witnessed a "775% increase of the number of calls and monthly meetings made on Microsoft Teams in a month, "reads a post on the Azure blog.
To this question is added use (all over the world) Windows Virtual Desktop, grown more than three times, and record numbers made by Microsoft Teams, Xbox Game Pass, Xbox Live and Mixer. Consequently Microsoft had to take initiatives to ensure that the services remain of good quality for the widest possible audience. For example, with regards to Xbox services, Microsoft has "temporarily disabled the ability to upload profile pictures (gamerpic), club photos and custom club backgrounds".
As already mentioned by Akamai in recent days, Microsoft is also working to ensure that game updates are not served to users during peak hours, in a similar way to what Sony is doing. Last week the Redmond house said that will give priority access to the cloud to first aid personnel and emergency services, and at the same time will try to keep Microsoft Teams stable. The use of Teams has grown by 12 million people in just a week, from 32 to 44 million daily active users, enough to record some service interruptions.
Microsoft temporarily modified some aspects of Teams to improve overall capacity and reliability. "We have made some temporary changes to some non-essential features such as how often we check for user presence, the interval at which we show when the person you communicate with is writing, and the video resolution."
UPDATE 31-03-2020 at 14:08: Microsoft has edited the blog post explaining that the 775% increase does not concern all cloud services and different geographical areas, but the number of "monthly calls and meetings" on Microsoft Teams made in one month in Italy, where very restrictive measures were taken in advance of the other countries. We have modified the first part of the original news accordingly.