Nadella: Microsoft Teams Users Nearly Doubled Since Start of Pandemic

Lest the impression set in that Microsoft Teams usage growth plateaued early in the pandemic, CEO Satya Nadella uncorked a massive new number this week as part of Microsoft's third quarter earnings release.

"Teams now has over 145 million daily active users, almost double the number a year ago," Nadella said during the earnings call Tuesday.

The real-time collaboration platform with video meeting capabilities vaulted from about 20 million daily active users in November 2019 to 75 million DAU by mid-March of 2020. Since then, Microsoft has been relatively quiet about Teams usage metrics. That changed this week, with Nadella providing more context for the continuing expansion of the Teams user base.

"The number of organizations with more than 1,000 users integrating their third-party and LOB apps with Teams has increased nearly 3X year over year," he said. "We are accelerating our innovation, adding over 300 features over the past year, including more than 100 new capabilities so far in 2021. ... Teams is extending beyond communications, creating an entirely new category of modern collaborative applications, as organizations use Power Platform to build custom apps, bots and workflows within Teams."

As vaccination counts increase worldwide, a big question for platforms that replace office interactions and travel-based meetings is whether the pandemic-related usage will last.

Nadella wants investors to believe that the momentum will continue. "In markets where employees have returned to the workplace, including Australia, China, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan, we have seen usage continue to grow," he said.

The remarks came as Microsoft announced third quarter earnings of $1.95 per share on revenues of $41.71 billion. Both exceeded analyst expectations, although the stock fell in after-hours trading.

The Teams milestone also came on a day with one of the higher-profile global outages for the service. The Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) account on Twitter reported an outage initially impacting Europe and Asia around 6:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday and confirmed about 20 minutes later that it was a global issue for Teams. According to the account, the Teams environment appeared to be fully restored a few hours later at 9:03 a.m.

In other milestone metrics on Tuesday, Nadella noted that Office 365 now has nearly 300 million paid seats, Windows 10 has more than 1.3 billion monthly active devices and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) has a paid customer base of over 300,000, more than double the total for last year.

Posted by Scott Bekker on April 28, 2021