There have been a fair few surges in online activity recently, and understandably so. The impact that Coronavirus (aka COVID-19) has on the internet is sizeable, and not all of it is bad: for example, Microsoft has seen a huge increase in people using many of its services.
In a blog post on the Microsoft Azure Blog, as highlighted originally by VG247, Microsoft detailed some of the specific ways that things have been impacted by so many of us staying at home. For starters, there has been a "775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders", which is an astoundingly large figure.
There's also been an increase of usage of the Windows Virtual Desktop by over 300 percent. Plus," a very significant spike in Teams usage, and now have more than 44 million daily users. Those users generated over 900 million meeting and calling minutes on Teams daily in a single week." It's all makes sense of course, but seeing numbers like this shared really gives a feel for just how integral the services are, but also how important the internet is nowadays as well, why it's almost as if it's a basic necessity in daily life or something.
The blog post also details some of the ways that Xbox Live is impacting the overall Azure experience, and how they're trying to keep everyone happy. "We're actively monitoring performance and usage trends to ensure we're optimizing services for gamers worldwide. At the same time, we're taking proactive steps to plan for high-usage periods, which includes taking prudent measures with our publishing partners to deliver higher-bandwidth activities like game updates during off-peak hours."
Delaying updates is a great way of trying to ensure that we can all still play online whenever we want, while also trying to limit the impact that we might have on things overall. Gaming actually uses substantially less bandwidth than streaming video services do, but it's good to try and do our bit to decrease the load overall. It's all part of trying to make life as normal, and as comfortable, as possible while we're all stuck inside.
At the moment, it seems like Coronovirus will not impact the planned release of Xbox Series X this coming winter. Of course, as with everything, that could well change.