Shares of Microsoft (MSFT) are on the rise on Monday after the company said in a blog post that it has seen a 775% usage increase of its Microsoft 365 cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders. The company added in a regulatory filing late on Monday that the metric in the statement was intended to refer only to a specific cloud-based service, Teams calling and meeting monthly users, in a specific country, Italy.
CLOUD SERVICES, TEAMS USAGE SPIKE: In a blog post, Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365, said that "in response to health authorities emphasizing the importance of social distancing, we've seen usage increases in services that support these scenarios – including Microsoft Teams, Windows Virtual Desktop, and Power BI."
The company has seen a 775% increase of its cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders, and has seen a "very significant spike" in Teams usage, which have now more than 44M daily users, according to Spataro. Windows Virtual Desktop usage has also grown more than three-times, while government use of public Power BI to share COVID-19 dashboards with citizens has surged by 42%, the post stated.
"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. These are 'soft' quota limits, and customers can raise support requests to increase these limits. If requests cannot be met immediately, we recommend customers use alternative regions - of our 54 live regions - that may have less demand surge. To manage surges in demand, we will expedite the creation of new capacity in the appropriate region," Spataro explained. "Despite the significant increase in demand, we have not had any significant service disruptions."
The executive also noted that Microsoft has been in "regular communication" with ISPs across the globe and is "actively working" with them to augment capacity as needed. "In particular, we've been in discussions with several ISPs that are taking measures to reduce bandwidth from video sources in order to enable their networks to be performant during the workday," he added.
However, in a regulatory filing, Microsoft explained that, "On March 28, 2020, Microsoft Corporation posted an entry on the Microsoft Azure Blog, a site directed primarily at customers, partners, and other parties interested in developments in Azure technologies and services. The post contained, among other information, a statement that 'We have seen a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders.' The metric in this statement was intended to refer only to a specific cloud-based service, Teams calling and meeting monthly users, in a specific country, Italy. The statement was not intended to provide information about the performance of Azure and cloud services generally, Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud segment, or Microsoft as a whole. We corrected the blog entry to clarify the nature of this information on March 30, 2020."
PRICE ACTION: In morning trading, shares of Microsoft have gained 5.5% to $157.84.
Published March 30th, 2020 11:10, updated to include regulatory filing March 31, 2020 07:25
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