Microsoft Corp.’s Teams has broken a new record during the coronavirus pandemic with 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day.

The figure is said to be an increase of 200% from 900 million meeting minutes on March 16 and is in part credited to a surge of 183,000 “tenants” in 175 countries using Teams for Education.

Teams launched in March 2017 in direct competition to Slack Inc. and has continued to surge in popularity. The service passed Slack in popularity in December 2018 and then passed 13 million users in July. Notably, Microsoft has often publicly compared its user data to that of Slack but Slack itself struck back in October by claiming that “users are more engaged with its tools than those who use rival Microsoft Corp.’s Teams product.”

Fast forward to 2020 and large parts of the world are in lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft reported March 19 that it had picked up 12 million new users while Slack claimed to have picked up 7,000 new customers.

Microsoft said in a blog post that “as the world works in Microsoft 365, searches in Bing, and connects on LinkedIn, it creates trillions of signals — like emails, meetings, searches, and posts — that form the Microsoft Graph, one of the largest graphs of human interactions at work in the world. Trends in this data provide a unique view into the world’s productivity patterns.”

That first claim is true. Microsoft 365, previously known as Office 365 until March 30, is growing rapidly during the coronavirus pandemic as millions are forced to work from home.

The world doesn’t search Bing, however, no matter how much Microsoft wishes they did. According to data from Statcounter, Google LLC holds a 91.98% search engine share as of March 2020, versus Bing at 2.55%.

LinkedIn is an interesting case among many during the COVID-19 pandemic. While most social networks have surged in usage numbers during the pandemic, LinkedIn is a notable exception. The Next Web reported April 2 that “the only large social network that’s experiencing a significant downturn in search attention is LinkedIn, which has seen a 23% drop to be precise.”

LinkedIn, acquired by Microsoft in June 2016 for $26.2 billion, has always had a focus on jobs and related employment opportunities. That was a strength during good times, but with unemployment in the U.S. now estimated to be 13% and rising, the appeal of LinkedIn is declining.

Image: Microsoft