The company tries to deal with a huge boost in demand

Mar 18, 2020 07:38 GMT  ·  By

The adoption of Office 365 has skyrocketed in the last few weeks, especially as a result of more and more people staying home due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Europe is already in lockdown, and earlier this week, the software giant experienced the first issues, as its software allowing employees to work from home struggled to deal with the huge number of connections.

As a result, Microsoft’s making adjustments to Office 365 in an attempt to prevent similar issues from happening in the future, and one way to do this is by throttling certain non-essential features of the productivity suite.

In other words, Microsoft’s making features that don’t normally affect your work require less resources, all in an attempt to guarantee smooth performance for everybody without the risk of an outage.

No impact on performance

In notifications sent to Office 365 in the admin message center, Microsoft explains that some of the features that are getting throttled include how often the system checks for presence, video resolution, and the interval used to show when the other party is typing.

“To best support our Microsoft 365 customers worldwide and accommodate new growth and demand during these unprecedented times, we're making temporary adjustments to select non-essential capabilities. We do not expect these changes to have significant impact on the end users experience but wanted to make you aware,” Microsoft says.

Without a doubt, this is a welcome and reasonable approach, especially as these changes aren’t supposed to impact work in any way.

Microsoft itself has been hit hard by the COVID-19 outbreak, as the company has already moved its Build developer conference online. Build is Microsoft’s largest tech event of the year, as the company uses this venue to announce major software updates, including the improvements coming to the Windows operating system.