Microsoft Teams adds 12 million daily users in a week

Microsoft Teams got 12 million new daily users in the last seven days, according to a report Microsoft released earlier today. The cloud-based communication and collaboration tool is now powering over 44 million remote workers and learners per day.

Microsoft Teams celebrates its third anniversary this week.

COVID-19 drives an unprecedented surge in Teams usage

The world is now turning to digital workspaces and video conferencing platforms like Teams to enable the continuity of business operations and learning in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Microsoft is itself leading by example, allowing tens of thousands of its employees to work from home. They are using Teams to communicate and collaborate on workplace matters.

Already, we are seeing how solutions that enable remote work and learning across chat, video, and file collaboration have become central to the way we work. We have seen an unprecedented spike in Teams usage, and now have more than 44 million daily users.

Some schools have already closed in different parts of the world due to the COVID-19 threat. No wonder a proportion of the 12 million new Teams users comprise students and institutions of higher learning.

For example, the University of Bologna, Italy, moved 90% of courses to the cloud-hosted communication tool.

Fortune 100 companies are using Teams

It is quite an achievement for Microsoft Teams to earn the recognition of several of the largest and most successful corporations in the U.S. The Redmond tech giant said that 93 Fortune 100 companies are using the Office 365-powered product.

Part of the platform’s growth can also be attributed to its extensive reach, worldwide. It is available in 181 markets, and it supports 53 different languages.

Will Teams deliver on expectations?

With over 44 million daily users, Teams is probably the leading digital workspace tool by now. Before COVID-19, organizations used the platform for purposes like optimizing productivity and convenience.

But today, businesses are leveraging Teams as a necessity—a matter of survival. Companies want their operations to continue, and their employees want to stay safe.

So, can remote working with chat, video conferencing, and file-sharing tools work when it is the only option? Hopefully, the technology will meet user expectations in areas like latency, service availability, and data security.

Scalability is also critical to the reliability of Teams at times like this. Consider the case of an unexpected nationwide lockdown. Would all affected organizations manage to deploy Teams to hundreds of thousands of remote workers quickly?

The world will find out soon enough.