Microsoft says video calls in Teams grew by 1,000% in March amid COVID-19 lockdown

Amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, almost all the nations across the world have imposed strict lockdown measures and levied social distancing policies. However, this has led to a sharp surge in online activities including video calls. On April 10, Tech giant Microsoft reportedly announced video calls on its Teams applications have risen by 1,000 per cent in the month of March.

The Redmond based tech company also added that as schools and companies have shut worldwide especially in the US, the educational usage of its Teams productivity software has risen. In addition to that, the proportion of meetings and calls including both audio and video have more than doubled from 20 per cent to a record 43 per cent over the previous month.

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Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365 while talking to media reporters revealed that the use was interspersed throughout the day. He added that they usually saw spurts in a team of video conferencing. After which they saw people going offline followed by a "bunch of work in chat and documents" before getting back to video conferencing.

Educational use rises 

Along with video calls, Educational use of Teams have also seen a rise, 1,83,000 educational organizations, each of them with more than one school, in nearly 175 nations was now using to Microsoft Teams. Also, overall minutes spent in meetings by all Teams users hit 2.7 billion on March 31 which was triple the,900 million minutes on March 19.

Read: Microsoft Engineer Adapts Fan-tracking App For COVID-19 Use

In another news, a Microsoft engineer who designed an app to track North Dakota State University football fans on their annual trek to Texas for the national championship has taken that concept and applied it to contact tracing for the coronavirus. The Care19 app is meant to help reduce the spread of COVID-19 by retracing the steps of people who test positive for the virus, in order to find others who may have had contact with the sick person and also collect data to help with modelling, Gov. Doug Burgum said April 7 during his daily briefing.

Image credits: Twitter/MicrosoftTeams

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