Microsoft Teams Goes Down as Europe Tries to Work From Home

Coronavirus means people across Europe are self-isolating and working from home, but users of Microsoft’s Slack competitor struggled to log in and send messages to colleagues.

By Adam Smith | edited by Frances Dodds | Mar 16, 2020
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via PC Mag

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, the company’s 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 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 in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Europe recently became the , according to the WHO.

As 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 as more people have to work from home, food delivery services are offering a ‘ and other companies are or during the pandemic. Across the technology industry, product launches are expected to be delayed due to 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 , and Microsoft has launched a through its Bing search engine.

, the company’s 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 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 in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Europe recently became the , according to the WHO.

Adam Smith • Contributing Editor PC Mag UK

Adam Smith is the Contributing Editor for PCMag UK, and has written about technology for... Read more
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