Microsoft Corp. said it has increased network and data centre capacity, opening new sites and striking deals with internet service providers, to help manage a pandemic-related surge in demand for its Azure and Office cloud services that led some customers to experience outages and slowdowns.
“Throughout the crisis Microsoft and Azure have been focused on prioritizing our most critical customers,” said Mark Russinovich, Microsoft’s chief technology officer for Azure cloud services, in a video posted on the company’s website Tuesday. That meant initially focusing on health care, first responders and government infrastructure, he said. Next the company tried to alter services to cut down on traffic at peak times, shifted workloads to less busy regions and attempted to predict the next surges in usage.
When demand was highest during the pandemic, Microsoft slowed down or turned off nonessential features like one in its Teams chat app that shows users whether the person they are chatting with is composing a reply. Teams also stopped fetching next week’s calendar from Microsoft’s Exchange email and calendar app.
Contributing to some of the problems, Microsoft wasn’t able to purchase enough equipment to expand cloud data centres last quarter because the virus disrupted manufacturing in China, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said in April. Hood pledged additional spending on data centres and equipment this quarter and said the issues should be resolved by the end of June.
As companies moved to work from home, Microsoft saw a massive increase in use of virtual private network services, which let employees on home computers connect securely to corporate networks — there was a 700-per-cent jump in downloads of VPN client software and a 94-per-cent increase in connections to Azure VPN, Russinovich said.
Traffic into Microsoft’s networks that connect data centre regions together and to the outside world spiked 40 per cent, he said. Hackers, sensing an opportunity, became more active and there was a 50-per-cent increase in so-called distributed denial of service attacks, which Microsoft said it was able to repel.
The Xbox gaming business saw a 50-per-cent increase in multiplayer usage and 50-per-cent increase in daily new accounts, he said.
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