Microsoft has this month recorded a 775 per cent increase in its Azure cloud services due to the ongoing CoronaVirus pandemic that has been continually accelerated cloud services usage.
Last week, through their Microsoft Azure page, Microsoft announced that following the global pandemic, its team is working to support its customers especially critical health and safety operations.
As of this month, most companies have resorted to working from home to embrace social distancing. Internet usage at the same time has surged. For example, Sony has lessened gamed download speeds to manage internet congestion. For instance, Microsoft has recorded a spike in Teams usage currently documenting more than 44 million users a day. Those users have generated over 900 million meeting and calling meetings for just a single week.
Further, Microsoft has recorded a 775 per cent increase in the usage of cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing. North, West and South Europe. Other areas include UK South, France Central, Eastern parts of Asia, India South and Brazil have recorded high usage. Surprisingly, Microsoft is yet to record any downtimes due to the surge in usage.
Microsoft has increased the monitoring of services for certain key users. Noting that, “our top priority remains support for critical health. As well as safety organizations and ensuring remote workers stay up and running with the core functionality of Teams”.
Microsoft has as well implemented restrictions including limiting free offers, capping resources for new subscribers, and pausing some features of Teams. To help cope with the increased demand, there are plans to increase capacity.
“Concurrently, in this period we monitor support requests. And, if needed, encourage customers to consider alternative regions or alternative resource types, depending on their timeline and requirements. If the implementation of these efforts to alleviate demand is not sufficient, customers may experience intermittent deployment-related issues. Which if it happens, impacted customers are informed via Azure Service Health.
Additionally, Microsoft is monitoring the impact of Xbox Live on its Azure capacity.
