Microsoft now has 145 million people using its Microsoft Teams communications app. This is another increase of 26 percent since Microsoft revealed Teams usage had jumped during the pandemic to 115 million daily active users in October 2020. Usage of Teams has spiked over the past year, with businesses continuing to flock to services like Teams, Slack, and Zoom.
To put the 145 million figure in perspective, at the beginning of the pandemic, Microsoft had around 32 million daily active users of Microsoft Teams. That jumped to 75 million in a matter of weeks, and these numbers have more than doubled since even the early days of the pandemic. It’s an impressive amount of growth, just as Microsoft has been aggressively pushing businesses to move to the cloud and adopt Teams over the past year.
As always, it’s difficult to compare to rival services. Google and Zoom don’t reveal daily active users and opt for a more vague daily active participants. This means a single user could be counted multiple times if they participate in different meetings during a day. Zoom revealed it had 300 million daily active participants last year, and Google said last year it had 100 million daily active participants. Slack revealed it had 12.5 million concurrent users during the beginning of the pandemic last year, but the company has shied away from daily active user counts ever since.
Microsoft’s explosive Teams growth might explain why the service has experienced troubles this year. Teams went down worldwide for many users for two hours this morning, after a similar outage earlier this month and connectivity issues last month.