Many people have been making this face over the last few days.

The impacts of the coronavirus are far-reaching.

Many of the world’s biggest companies have been experiencing outages in recent days as unprecedented demand takes a toll on available resources.

With the coronavirus in full force and many locked down to their homes, a huge upsurge in use is causing problems for tech giants. From productivity software to internet service providers, outages are popping up across the UK and the rest of the world.

Who has been having problems?

Maybe the better question to ask would be who hasn’t? Video conferencing has taken a big blow. Last week, both Zoom and Microsoft Teams had problems, the latter of which I experienced first hand while working from home. It was a total outage in my case – no messages were coming in or out and we had to resort to email for an afternoon. Cisco’s Webex also had some reports of issues, mainly complaining Twitter users, but it’s difficult to judge the severity as companies are staying tight-lipped about problems around this time with it being a huge opportunity for new customers – a big outage could cost them dearly.

Office 365, one of the most (if not the most) popular productivity suite in the world was also not without its problems. The huge uptake in demand has caused issues among its services. Over the past week, Microsoft has reported issues mainly with Skype for Business and Exchange Online. At the time of writing, Microsoft is reporting multiple service degradation advisories – again, mostly with Teams – as well a bigger incident with SharePoint. Its biggest rival, G-Suite, seems to be faring slightly better with no incidents in the last seven days.

Office 365 is currently experiencing issues across Sharepoint, Teams, and others.

TeamViewer hasn’t been having much luck in recent days. I have personally had problems with it both this morning and yesterday. I wasn’t the only one of course as this graph from Downdetector will show you.

TeamViewer had an outage this morning – similar to yesterday.

TeamViewer did acknowledge this on their status page although the outage lengths did seem a bit too lenient for my liking – they were certainly much longer. The company isn’t helping themselves by changing the stance on free users and allowing unlimited use of their software, without checking whether it is being used commercially or not. TeamViewer has since told The Register the outage was not as a result of the coronavirus, rather “side-effects due to a release in our infrastructure.”

There have also been increasing rumours and reports of outages with phone networks – the likes of O2 and Vodafone affected. These, however, have not been widescale so far.

In terms of ISPs, TalkTalk appeared to have issues. They don’t, however, offer outage history information on their website and the only news sources I could find reporting this were unreliable, to say the least. Having said that, they did have a huge surge of reports on Downdetector this morning which is a fairly good indication that something is going wrong.

With schools closing, educational applications are also facing increased use. Firefly, a remote-learning app, has seen 2.5 times more traffic than usual. Simon Hay, the company’s CEO, told the BBC, “There will be teething problems as we are dealing with a completely unprecedented situation…But we are working around the clock to scale everything up as much as we can.” Approximately 500 schools around the UK utilise Firefly’s services.

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How are companies mitigating the demand increase?

With media streaming a being a huge bandwidth consumer, many streaming services have reduced the video bitrate speed to reduce strain on ISPs. Initially done by Netflix, they have since been joined by Amazon Prime, YouTube, Apple TV+, as well as Disney+. Despite a traffic increase of 35-60% on BT’s network, the surge in traffic still falls well short (10 Tbps to be precise) of the ISP’s peak level of 17.5 Tbps and the company are convinced they are well-equipped to see this through.

Many are turning to gaming to pass the time and PlayStation has now announced they are working with European ISPs to try and limit the impact this has on networks. This won’t cause games to be throttled while playing online, rather they are looking on slowing down are delaying the downloads or games which can easily reach 100GB.

Moving into enterprise announcements, Microsoft has created a list of Azure users that will be granted priority when it comes to provisioning storage. In a blog post, the company has announced “Top priority will be going to first responders, health and emergency management services, critical government infrastructure organizational use, and ensuring remote workers stay up and running with the core functionality of Teams.”

Will they be able to cope?

At the moment, the increase in demand has obviously caused a few problems. It has to be noted, however, that these outages and precautions are not the end of the world. Companies face outages every day, both big and small, and there is without a doubt increased scrutiny at the moment due to the current events. So, while the sheer volume of traffic may have caught some by surprise, they are undoubtedly adapting and provisioning more resources for general availability. With most people seemingly working from home now, there shouldn’t be too much to worry about.

(Updated 25/03/20 to reflect TeamViewer’s statement to The Register.)

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