
Microsoft Teams goes down just as Europe logs on to work remotely - JDEW
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/16/21181300/microsoft-teams-down-outage-europe-remote-working-coronavirus
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onion2k
I'm in an office in the North East of the UK and MSFT Teams is working fine.

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jerome-jh
Worked fine in France as well, all morning.

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eitland
Works for my kids as well but it is a bit slow.

FWIW the Teams client seems to work a lot faster than the website.

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ctack
COVID-19 is going to be global scale proof of work for remote work - both for
companies and for networks.

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cameronbrown
Genuinely, I think this will backfire and it will be proof that remote working
isn't for everyone..

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meheleventyone
I don't think it's going to show anything worthwhile as the whole pandemic
thing is a huge confounding factor and the adoption has been hugely ad hoc. In
particular people are going to suddenly find themselves working from home in
completely unsuitable conditions and the whole social distancing thing means
normal remote ideas like coworking spaces and coffee shops aren't really an
option.

As someone who has been remotely working mostly from my home for two years
today I'm joined by my wife and a three year old and a five year old. My work
desk is in the living room as our house is teensy and trying to do anything of
substance with two kids is very hard! On top of the added stress caused by the
global situation being a distraction in itself.

My wife should be remote working but a last minute change meant it's now up in
the air whether her office will actually allow VPN access. This is after they
issued her with a brand new laptop, monitor and so on. So now she's spending
the day at home tidying up our storage.

Remote work in this context is nothing more than trying to keep the wheels
turning and people expecting the benefits that come with doing it more
deliberately are definitely going to be disappointed.

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cameronbrown
I agree. I work remotely quite often, around a week every month - but I do
feel like productivity has been reduced just because people around me also
have reduced productivity, are less available on IM, etc.. I also miss going
into the office and being there physically, even though I don't really sit at
my desk, it's nice to have the space there.

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eric234223
Let the people managers keep complaining how remote work is not going to work
.In the meanwhile i share my amazing tip.

If you are on ubuntu and want to remote desktop to windows machine try this
opensource amazing freerdp tool

$ sudo apt install freerdp2-x11 $ xfreerdp '/u:domain\username'
/p:PasswordSuperSecret /v:hostname.com /w:1920 /h:1080 -grab-keyboard
/monitors:0 -themes -wallpaper +fonts +clipboard -decorations

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yulaow
In italy some big universities (like those in Milan) started using microsoft
teams for streaming lectures and indeed they already had problems last week.
My girlfriend who studies there said she was constantly disconnected from the
service each 2-3 minutes and had to wait the same time to reconnect
successfully

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nicoburns
Zoom and similar providers must be having to ramp up capacity quite
significantly at the moment!

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yagodragon
Would it be better if instead of relying on centralized servers, we used p2p
solutions like Jitsi, which is based on WebRTC? Some universities and
companies could even set up TURN servers for public use

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notlukesky
I doubt these outages will hurt Microsoft at all.

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JackPoach
I am sure that AWS, Azure and Google Cloud will be the next victims of
COVID-19. There's just no way to scale infrastructure up as fast as necessary.
People think about cloud as 'elastic' but there's a fixed number of data
centers with a fixed number of servers in each at any give time.

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trevyn
Are you suggesting GCP/AWS/Azure will run out of capacity because of higher
usage?

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JackPoach
I am. They weren't built for the times with EVERYONE needs to scale up at the
same time.

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3327
My manager forced me to use teams, and I gotta say its down half the time,
messages go late. Its basically as bad As skype and there is no reason it
should be better in the future.

Microsoft is terrible at making product and will remain so for the future.

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onion2k
I don't really mind Teams, but the fact you can't drop an image in to a chat
to upload it like you can in Slack _really_ annoys me.

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K0SM0S
You could already do that in MSN Messenger like, 15 or 20 years ago.

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aliswe
Well Teams is not a direct descendant of Messenger, so it's not like they
broke that function. For me that's not a good point.

But, for the record it doesn't work for me either.

