14 DAY TRIAL // With almost the entire world working from home, it’s pretty clear that the Internet faces a big test, especially as the coronavirus outbreak keeps expanding to more countries.
Like other tech companies, Microsoft makes big efforts to keep its services available for everyone 24/7, so the software giant has recently announced a series of changes for its remote working solutions to reduce bandwidth usage as much as possible.
Most of these decisions come down to disabling features that aren’t necessarily used for working from home, despite them some requiring some bandwidth.
Internet rush hour
But according to the New York Times, Microsoft is also looking elsewhere to reduce usage. The company has reportedly reached out to game studios to ask them to avoid rolling out game updates at peak hours, pretty much saving the bandwidth for things like working remotely.
In an email seen by the cited source, the Xbox team tells game companies to only roll out game updates in a four-hour overnight window in North America. Microsoft also wants updates to go live from Monday through Thursday.
“Microsoft is actively monitoring performance and usage trends to ensure we’re optimizing service for our customers worldwide, and accommodating new growth and demand,” the company is quoted as saying. “At the same time, these are unprecedented times, and we’re also taking proactive steps to plan for these high-usage periods.”
Needless to say, this is a good measure that would prevent services from going down. Several other companies have also announced tweaks to their services to reduce bandwidth usage. YouTube and Netflix, for example, have both reduced the quality of their videos, while others turned to throttled download speeds to make sure no outage is recorded.
At the time of writing, there are over 533,000 cases of people infected with the new coronavirus. More than 24,000 persons have already died from the virus.