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Microsoft Corp. said its cloud services have seen a massive spike in usage since countries began enforcing social distancing and other measures in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

The company said Saturday it has seen a 775% increase in the use of services such as Microsoft Teams, Power BI and Windows Virtual Desktop in areas that have introduced social distancing rules and stay-at-home orders.

Update: Microsoft clarified that the increase was much narrower than it first appeared. It said Monday evening that the 775% jump was only for Teams calling and meeting monthly users, and only in a one-month period in Italy.

The reason for the increase in traffic is fairly obvious, as Microsoft’s tools are proving to be invaluable, both for people working at home and those who’re just bored out of their minds with nothing to do. For example, Microsoft’s Teams collaboration app saw its daily active users spike by 37% earlier this month. Teams users are now generating more than 900 million minutes of activity per day, and rival apps such as Slack and Zoom have also seen similar increases in usage.

Windows Virtual Desktop has three times as much usage as normal, while Power BI use is up 42%, the company said. In addition, Microsoft’s gaming service Xbox Live is seeing record numbers of users as people resort to playing video games to stave off the boredom of being locked indoors.

With so many users, Microsoft has also taken some steps to ensure that everything keeps running smoothly and there are no outages, especially for those in the front lines of the battle to contain the coronavirus.

In a blog post, the company noted that it is “providing the highest level of monitoring” for first responders and health-related systems. It has also placed limits on free offers and some resources for new Azure subscriptions, while Teams’ video calls are now at a lower resolution to save on bandwidth. The company added that it is planning to add “significant new capacity” in the coming weeks to keep its cloud services up and running.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that it’s the elasticity of cloud infrastructure that makes it so ideal during uncertain times like what we’re seeing today, with the outbreak of the SARS-COV-2 virus.

“It’s reassuring to see that Azure is working to ensure it has the headroom capacity it needs,” Mueller said. “And Microsoft appears to be doing the right thing as the steward of that capacity, by steering it towards the most critical functions of nations first of all.”

Microsoft’s update comes just days after Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella told CNBC that the company’s back-end systems were coping just fine, even though he admitted the demand it is seeing is “unprecedented.”

“If this was a previous generation of data center architectures or software architectures, I don’t think we would have been able to deal with this crisis as effectively as we have been able to,” he told CNBC.

Photo: Kārlis Dambrāns/Flickr