Company turns to temporary adjustments to avoid outages

Mar 25, 2020 06:42 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has recently announced a series of changes for Office 365 in an attempt to avoid outages that could be caused by the high demand in certain regions, such as Europe.

With the world staying home due to the coronavirus outbreak and many employees working remotely, solutions like Office 365 and Microsoft Teams have recorded a substantial increase in terms of usage.

Microsoft has recently announced that it’s throttling certain less-used Microsoft Teams features to maintain strong performance for everyone, and now the software giant is doing the same for Office 365.

In an announcement in the Office 365 admin center, Microsoft explains that these changes are all temporary, which means the normal configuration should be back once the coronavirus outbreak is over and the regular usage returns.

“As a part of our commitment to customers and Microsoft cloud services continuity during these unprecedented times, we're making temporary adjustments to select capabilities within Microsoft 365. Last week, we shared details about adjustments in Microsoft Teams, such as how often we check for presence, the interval in which we show when the other party is typing, and reduced video resolution,” Microsoft explains.

More specifically, the changes concern OneNote, SharePoint, and Stream.

For example, OneNote in Teams will be read-only for commercial tenants, in which case OneNote for the web is the only way to edit documents. In the case of SharePoint, Microsoft has reduced video resolution for playback videos, while in Stream, the meeting recording resolution has been adjusted to 720p.

You can find all changes announced today below:

OneNote:

  • OneNote in Teams will be read-only for commercial tenants, excluding EDU. Users can go to OneNote for the web for editing.
  • Download size and sync frequency of file attachments has been changed.
  • You can find details on these and other OneNote related updates as http://aka.ms/notesupdates.

SharePoint:

  • We are rescheduling specific backend operations to regional evening and weekend business hours. Impacted capabilities include migration, DLP and delays in file management after uploading a new file, video or image.
  • Reduced video resolution for playback videos.

Stream:

  • People timeline has been disabled for newly uploaded videos. Pre-existing videos will not be impacted.
  • Meeting recording video resolution adjusted to 720p