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Microsoft (MSFT) Shares Rise 6.87%, Microsoft Cloud Services See 775% Spike

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) shares experienced a sharp uptick of 6.87% in the late European trading hours, to clinch at $159.99. The spike in stock is being attributed to the rise in usage of its services as the coronavirus outbreak pushes people to stay at home and find constructive things to keep them busy.

On Saturday, the company reported that it had experienced a 775% usage increase for its services. The services which saw a rise in users include Microsoft Teams, Power BI, and also Windows Virtual Desktop. According to the report, the company saw a major rise in regions that are experiencing social distancing, especially lockdown areas.

According to the statement from the company, the Windows Virtual Desktop tripled in usage over the past few weeks. On the other hand, the power BI, which is being used by the government to share the coronavirus data dashboard, rose by over 42% in the past few weeks.

The blog post went ahead to note that the Microsoft team has served over 44 million users on a daily basis and in addition, it has handled over 900 million meetings in the past few weeks only. In a bid to reduce the system’s workload, Microsoft has temporarily adjusted the non-essential capabilities. Some of these capabilities include how often a user can check the user presence, the interval at which a user shows when the other party is in typing mode, and also the video resolution.

As coronavirus affected numbers continue rising exponentially, there are no direct answers as to how long Microsoft will enjoy the good reception of its services. At the moment, the company will have to continue reaping huge benefits as a tech company, with its stock likely to skyrocket in the near future.

However, if a vaccine or a cure is found sooner than the company anticipated, the rise may not be sustained and the stock prices are likely to dip down. This is because most people are going to resume their daily operations, without the worry of contracting the virus.

As people get to stay at home, most are turning to Xbox live, Microsoft gaming service, to help them in social connection. In order to keep its services running smoothly on Xbox live, Microsoft has switched of some Xbox live features, including custom gamerpics.

The spike on its services was also confirmed by the company’s CEO Satya Nadella who said that the back-end systems are holding up well, even though the scale is in unprecedented measure. He added:

“If this was a previous generation of data centre architecture or software architectures, I don’t think we would have been able to deal with this crisis as effective as we have been able to.”

He concluded that Microsoft will come out of the coronavirus disaster pretty strong.

Microsoft (MSFT) Shares Rise 6.87%, Microsoft Cloud Services See 775% Spike

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