Microsoft Teams Goes Down as Europe Tries to Work From Home

Microsoft Teams, the company’s Slack competitor has gone down today under the load of people across Europe attempting to work from home.

Teams users are reportedly having issues signing into the service and sending messages, and a Microsoft support Twitter account tweeted that it is “investigating messaging-related functionality problems within Microsoft Teams.” Replies to that tweet indicate these issues are affecting users in Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Romania, among others.

We have reached out to Microsoft for the cause of the outage, but it appears to have been concurrent with an uptick in users logging on to work from home in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Europe recently became the epicentre of the pandemic, according to the WHO.

As Downdetector reports, workers started experiencing problems using Teams at approximately 8am GMT in Europe, before a massive spike at around 9am. Reports state that 77 percent of the problems were due to server connection, with 20 percent reporting problems accessing the website and a smattering of users unable to log in. 

The spread of the coronavirus has affected workers, and the companies that interact with them, in a number of ways. ISPs have dropped their data caps as more people have to work from home, food delivery services are offering a ‘no-contact service,’ and other companies are offering extended warranties or free pornographic content during the pandemic. Across the technology industry, product launches are expected to be delayed due to impacted supply chains and conferences have had to be cancelled.

To help combat the spread of the virus, Google is launching a website that tells you where to get coronavirus tests, and Microsoft has launched a coronavirus tracker through its Bing search engine.