Microsoft Increases 775% in Cloud Services Amid Coronavirus as Many Work from Home

Microsoft Company has seen an enormous 775% surge in the 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.

Microsoft has now over 44 million daily users, and they created over 900 million meetings and calling minutes, business VP for Microsoft 365 Jared Spataro said on Sunday, March 29, in a blog post.

“With so many of our customers moving to full-time remote work—and relying on our cloud services to do so—they want to hear what measures we are taking to help ensure business continuity at this critical time,” said Jared adding, Windows Virtual Desktop usage ballooned “more than 3X.”

As of March 20, 58% of American knowledge workers were working at home, an unprecedented proportion.

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.

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.