Microsoft Cloud Services Usage Surges 775% for Teams in Regions With Enforced Social Distancing – Part 2
Per Microsoft’s blog updates to keep customers informed, a rather large correction was made surrounding increased cloud services usage. Stricken out was the incorrect information, with the corrected statistic to follow:
We have seen a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders.- We have seen a 775 percent increase in Teams' calling and meeting monthly users in a one month period in Italy, where social distancing or shelter in place orders have been enforced.
Teams has seen a prolific uptick and as users can attest, service quality has started to decline. While COVID-19 certainly has a large role to play, Microsoft has been experiencing issues prior to the outbreak and outside of just the Teams platform.
Adobe, Walmart, and Chevron, for instance, have run into issues with capacity constraints in Azure, causing frustration. Issues with launching or updating applications, delays when attempting to add servers, degraded performance levels, and access to pre-specified types of servers are a few examples.
The likely cause of these issues is Microsoft’s network design. Microsoft aimed to have data centers set up in as many geographical regions as possible. From a commercial perspective, this had helped Microsoft win business by providing local servers that enabled them to bypass governmental legislation or corporate data restrictions. However, it has potentially spread resourcing thin, as these data centers have less capacity. Google and AWS employed the opposite strategy, which was to build few data centers in each geographic region but with higher capacities.
In thinking about capacity constraints, Microsoft boasts some of the largest customer names in the world. While large customers provide clout to the service, a large customer or two leveraging intensive workloads can consume large amounts of available resources.
The ongoing issues have certainly had an impact on organizations doing their due diligence to procure new or additional services. For some, it has altered the decision-making process. While there has been frustration, most organizations aren’t ready to pull the plug on Microsoft just yet. Microsoft is rushing to add extra servers and capacity in regions that have been affected as well as to re-evaluate any free offerings that could be constraining capacity moving forward.
Our Take
- Expect capacity constraints in the short term, but help should be on its way, as Microsoft can scale quickly.
- Track and log downtime or issues that could come in necessary to attain service credits or refunds.
- When procuring further services, evaluate which providers may be more suitable in your region and which products you are looking to leverage.