{"id":234155,"date":"2020-03-29T10:30:18","date_gmt":"2020-03-29T17:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/?p=234155"},"modified":"2022-06-29T07:42:42","modified_gmt":"2022-06-29T14:42:42","slug":"update-2-microsoft-cloud-services-continuity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/microsoft-365\/blog\/2020\/03\/29\/update-2-microsoft-cloud-services-continuity\/","title":{"rendered":"Update #2 on Microsoft cloud services continuity"},"content":{"rendered":"
With so many of our customers moving to full-time remote work\u2014and relying on our cloud services to do so\u2014they want to hear what measures we are taking to help ensure business continuity at this critical time. Last week, I shared our plans<\/a> for adapting to unprecedented usage while supporting critical customer scenarios. Today, I\u2019m following up with a post answering some of the top related questions we\u2019ve heard from customers around the globe. Have a read.<\/p>\n Microsoft Azure blog<\/strong><\/p>\n Since last week\u2019s update, the global health pandemic continues to impact every organization\u2014large or small\u2014their employees, and the customers they serve. Everyone is working tirelessly to support all our customers, especially critical health and safety organizations across the globe, with the cloud services needed to sustain their operations during this unprecedented time. Equally, we are hard at work providing services to support hundreds of millions of people who rely on Microsoft to stay connected and to work and play remotely.<\/p>\n As Satya Nadella shared<\/a>, \u201cIt\u2019s times like this that remind us that each of us has something to contribute and the importance of coming together as a community.\u201d<\/em> In these times of great societal disruption, we are steadfast in our commitment to help everyone get through this.<\/p>\n For this week\u2019s update, we want to share common questions we\u2019re hearing from customers and partners along with insights to address these important inquiries. If you have any immediate needs, please refer to the following resources.<\/p>\n Azure Service Health<\/a>\u2014for tracking any issues impacting customer workloads and understanding Azure Service Health What have you observed over the last week?<\/strong> Have you made any changes to the prioritization criteria you outlined last week?<\/strong> Specifically, we are providing the highest level of monitoring during this time for the following:<\/p>\n Given your prioritization criteria, how will this impact other Azure customers?<\/strong> Have there been any service disruptions?<\/strong> Although the majority of deployments still succeed, (so we encourage any customers experiencing allocation failures<\/a> to retry deployments), we have a process in place to ensure that customers that encounter repeated issues receive relevant mitigation options. We treat these short-term allocation shortfalls as a service incident and we send targeted updates and mitigation guidance to impacted customers via Azure Service Health<\/a>\u2014as per our standard process for any known platform issues.<\/p>\n When these service incidents happen, how do you communicate to customers and partners?<\/strong> What actions are you taking to prevent capacity constraints?<\/strong> Have you needed to make any changes to the Teams experience?<\/strong> Is Xbox Live putting a strain on overall Azure capacity?<\/strong> How does in-home broadband use impact service continuity and capacity? Any specific work being done with ISPs?<\/strong> We\u2019ll continue to provide regular updates on the Microsoft Azure blog.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
Update #2 on Microsoft cloud services continuity<\/h3>\n
\nMicrosoft 365 Service health and continuity<\/a>\u2014for tracking and understanding M365 Service health
\nXbox Live<\/a>\u2014for tracking game and service status<\/p>\n
\nIn response to health authorities emphasizing the importance of social distancing, we\u2019ve seen usage increases in services that support these scenarios\u2014including Microsoft Teams, Windows Virtual Desktop, and Power BI.<\/p>\n\n
\nNo. Our top priority remains support for critical health and safety organizations and ensuring remote workers stay up and running with the core functionality of Teams.<\/p>\n\n
\nWe\u2019re implementing a few temporary restrictions designed to balance the best possible experience for all of our customers. We have placed limits on free offers to prioritize capacity for existing customers. We also have limits on certain resources for new subscriptions. These are \u2018soft\u2019 quota limits, and customers can raise support requests to increase these limits. If requests cannot be met immediately, we recommend customers use alternative regions (of our 54 live regions) that may have less demand surge. To manage surges in demand, we will expedite the creation of new capacity in the appropriate region.<\/p>\n
\nDespite the significant increase in demand, we have not had any significant service disruptions. As a result of the surge in use over the last week, we have experienced significant demand in some regions (Europe North, Europe West, U.K. South, France Central, Asia East, India South, Brazil South) and are observing deployments for some compute resource types in these regions drop below our typical 99.99 percent success rates.<\/p>\n
\nWe have standard operating procedures for how we manage both mitigation and communication. Impacted customers and partners are notified through the Service Health experience in the Azure portal and\/or in the Microsoft 365 admin center.<\/p>\n
\nWe are expediting the addition of significant new capacity that will be available in the weeks ahead. Concurrently, we monitor support requests and, if needed, encourage customers to consider alternative regions or alternative resource types, depending on their timeline and requirements. If the implementation of these efforts to alleviate demand is not sufficient, customers may experience intermittent deployment related issues. When this does happen, impacted customers will be informed via Azure Service Health<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\nTo best support our Teams customers worldwide and accommodate new growth and demand, we made a few temporary adjustments to select non-essential capabilities such as how often we check for user presence, the interval in which we show when the other party is typing, and video resolution. These adjustments do not have significant impact on our end users\u2019 daily experiences.<\/p>\n
\nWe\u2019re actively monitoring performance and usage trends to ensure we\u2019re optimizing services for gamers worldwide. At the same time, we\u2019re taking proactive steps to plan for high-usage periods, which includes taking prudent measures with our publishing partners to deliver higher-bandwidth activities like game updates during off-peak hours.<\/p>\n
\nWe\u2019ve been in regular communication with ISPs across the globe and are actively working with them to augment capacity as needed. In particular, we\u2019ve been in discussions with several ISPs that are taking measures to reduce bandwidth from video sources in order to enable their networks to be performant during the workday.<\/p>\n