Microsoft Teams Goes Down in Europe as Workers Opt For Work From Home Amid Coronavirus Outbreak

Brussels, March 16: Microsoft's unified communications platform for workplace "Teams" went down across Europe on Monday as thousands of workers opted for work from home in the wake of global coronavirus outbreak. Services of Microsoft Teams were disrupted for more than two hours before the tech giant rectified the issue. This is the second major outage to hit Microsoft Teams this year. Work From Home Amid Coronavirus Outbreak Difficult For Employees at 54 Percent of Indian Companies, Says Report.

According to reports, users of Microsoft Teams experienced issues signing into the service and sending messages. There is an increase in demand for the unified communications platform after several companies asked employees to work from home to prevent further spread of coronavirus. Besides, educational institutes are also using tools like Microsoft Teams for remote education. PM Narendra Modi Welcomes Work From Home for Employees, Suspension of Business Travel, Suggests Minimising Social Outings Amid COVID-19 Outbreak.

Microsoft Teams' services went down hours after Xbox Live went down briefly. The platform suffered an outage in February after Microsoft forgot to renew a key SSL security certificate. Services were restored after three hours and Microsoft apologised for missing the expired certificate. Recently, the company revealed that the platform had garnered more than 20 million daily active users.

Meanwhile, its rival "Slack" last month announced that it as 12 million active users. With this milestone, Microsoft Teams now has almost double the number of active users when compared to Slack. The global coronavirus outbreak has sickened more than 156,000 people and left more than 5,800 dead around the world.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 16, 2020 09:17 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).