For example, users first reported they were unable to change their status in the service. Soon after, other users said they were unable to use the messaging section properly. It seems this problem is still happening as Microsoft has not said it has been resolved. To check updates from Microsoft, head to the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account for live updates. So far, it is unclear if this outage has been caused by increased demand for Microsoft Teams amid the COVID-19 outbreak. Since the pandemic spread, Teams has seen a massive growth in users, doubling its daily active users to 44 million in March.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) April 28, 2020 Under the strain of this growth, Teams crashed twice. The service went down in Europe during the middle of last month, soon after Microsoft made many elements of the platform free. Two weeks later, Teams crashed again in the same region.
Expanding Cloud
Interestingly, this latest outage comes just days after Microsoft announced its is expanding Azure cloud services with a focus on Teams. To help handle the load in the COVID-19 world, Microsoft is boosting its worldwide data center output and says it is adding more resource limits to new Azure customers. “Last month, the surging use of Teams for remote work and education due to the pandemic crossed into unprecedented territory. Although we had seen surges in specific data center regions or wider geographies before, such as in response to natural disasters, the substantial Teams demand increase from Asia and then quickly followed in Europe indicated that we were seeing something very different, and increasingly global.”
