Microsoft’s cloud services have seen a 775% spike in usage in areas where social distancing measures and lockdowns have been enforced.

Azure services such as Microsoft Teams, Windows Virtual Desktop and Power BI have all seen increases of users in March as more and more have been forced to work from home or stay indoors.

The company recently announced it would prioritise capacity provisions for critical health and safety organisations to ensure the relevant remote workers can stay up and running during the coronavirus pandemic. However, with demand for cloud services surging in lockdown areas, the company has said it will «expedite» the creation of new capacity.

«We’re implementing a few temporary restrictions designed to balance the best possible experience for all of our customers,» the company wrote on its blog. «We have placed limits on free offers to prioritise capacity for existing customers.

«We are expediting the addition of significant new capacity that will be available in the weeks ahead. Concurrently, we monitor support requests and, if needed, encourage customers to consider alternative regions or alternative resource types, depending on their timeline and requirements. If the implementation of these efforts to alleviate demand is not sufficient, customers may experience intermittent deployment-related issues.»

So far, the only issue with Azure has been a two-hour outage for Microsoft Teams in Europe. The service went down on the first Monday of remote working as it saw a spike in usage.

Later it was revealed that Teams had seen 12 million more users in March, taking the number of daily active users to 44 million. Windows Virtual Desktop also trebled in usage and Microsoft’s business analytics service, Power BI, saw a 42% increase in just one week.

In addition, Microsoft also said its been in regular contact with ISPs around the world and is actively working with them to «argument» capacity as needed.

«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,» the company said.