Microsoft Teams passes 75 million daily active users

The coronavirus pandemic is juicing up numbers for remote work and learning. Microsoft’s fiscal Q3 2020 earnings call kicked off with CEO Satya Nadella sharing a slew of big numbers. 

The coronavirus pandemic is juicing up numbers for remote work and learning. Microsoft’s fiscal Q3 2020 earnings call kicked off with CEO Satya Nadella sharing a slew of big numbers. The biggest one: Microsoft Teams has passed 75 million daily active users. That’s up 70% from 44 million daily active users just six weeks ago, which was already up 110% four months prior. Microsoft attributed the spike in part to COVID-19.

“We saw more than 200 million meeting participants in a single day this month, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes,” Nadella said on the call. “Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users, engaging in rich forms of communication and collaboration, and two thirds of them shared, collaborated, or interacted with files on Teams.”

Not just about video calls

Microsoft is drinking its own Kool-Aid — this was the first time the company used Teams to host its earnings call. Teams is the company’s Office 365 chat-based collaboration tool that competes with Slack (12 million DAUs as of October), Facebook’s Workplace (3 million paid users as of October), and Google’s Hangouts Chat (no user number shared). Other apps, such as video conferencing tools, have also seen huge numbers due to the pandemic. Last week, Zoom passed 300 million participants and Google Meet passed 100 million participants. Last month, Microsoft shared that Skype’s daily active users were up 70% to 40 million.

The difference between apps like Teams and Skype is an important distinction that you’ll continue to hear Microsoft make, especially as it prepares to launch Teams for consumers. “Teams is not just about having lots and lots of video meetings,” Nadella said on the call. “Teams is about actually getting work done where meetings and video is one part. So that’s, for example, something [where the] utility of it will only increase for our customers as some people come back to work.” Once the pandemic is over, everyone will be watching to see where usage numbers for these services land.

Nadella also added that in health care alone, there were more than 34 million Teams meetings in the past month. More than 183,000 educational institutions now rely on Teams, and 20 organizations with more than 100,000 employees are also now using Teams.

Teams is Microsoft’s fastest-growing business app ever. Microsoft defines DAUs for Teams as “the maximum daily users performing an intentional action in a 24-hour period across the desktop client, mobile client, and web client. Intentional actions include sending or replying to a chat, joining a meeting, or opening a file in Teams. Passive actions like auto boot, minimizing a screen, or closing the app are not included.”

Nadella also reported that Microsoft had 258 million monthly active Office 365 business users in the past quarter. That means 29% of Office 365’s monthly business users are actively using Teams every day. Regardless of how Teams for consumers fares, there’s still plenty of room for Teams to grow.