Dive Brief:

• Microsoft Teams demand reached "unprecedented territory" in March, according to a company blog post. Other events, such as natural disasters, tested services before in specific data center regions. However the "substantial Teams demand increase from Asia and then quickly followed in Europe indicated that we were seeing something very different, and increasingly global."​
• As a result, Microsoft enacted "temporary resource limits" for new Azure subscriptions, including Teams and other Microsoft 365 services in March. ​Existing customers had no restrictions and carried on with their "defined quota of services," according to Microsoft. 
• Microsoft has since "optimized and load-balanced" Teams' architecture for scaling improvements, "expedited" more server capacity to regions with the most demand, and moved through the customer quota requests backlog. Microsoft's data science models are also collecting data to refine Azure demand models for future scenarios of stressed systems.

Dive Insight:

The coronavirus pandemics is testing the ability of technology vendors to rapidly scale.

In just seven days last month, Teams went from 14 customers with 100,000 users to 20 customers, and Jared Spataro, corporate VP of Microsoft 365, predicts companies will never "go back to working they way that we did," he said at the time. ​

Microsoft's cloud services increased by 775%, as stay-at-home orders swept across countries. The company warned the spike could impact performance — not even Microsoft is immune to capacity issues. 

In March, 6,136 companies in Europe experienced Azure service disruptions for up to nine hours. The primary incident manager was asleep, while a designated responsible individual searched for mitigations. 

While Microsoft described itself as a "technology first responder serving first responders" at the forefront of the outbreak, some customers want more transparency regarding resolution. 

As the business world faces workforce and economic challenges, a technology crash is an unwanted additional stressor. Customers are asking Microsoft for data on: 

• The timeline for the availability of resources to scale

• Post-mortem processes

• What Microsoft is doing to prevent an incident 

Even with issues, Microsoft's one-stop-shop business strategy makes it "well positioned," above Amazon, for additional technology spending because of the coronavirus, according to a recent CIO survey. Microsoft is the preferred infrastructure and platform as a service provider and for hybrid cloud environments. 

Unlike Amazon, Microsoft has an Office bundle catered to everyday work. Teams' reliability is crucial with a predominantly remote workforce, carving into a crowded market with Google Meet, Zoom and Slack.