Microsoft Teams surpasses 270M monthly active users, as growth slows from early days of pandemic

Todd Bishop
·1 min read
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Microsoft Teams usage soared in the early days of the pandemic. (Bigstock Photo)
Microsoft Teams usage soared in the early days of the pandemic. (Bigstock Photo)

Microsoft’s Teams communications and collaboration platform topped 270 million monthly active users in the December quarter, continuing to add users but at a much slower pace than in the initial months of the pandemic.

Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, revealed the latest number Tuesday afternoon in conjunction with the company’s quarterly earnings. The number represents an increase of 20 million monthly active users from the 250 million that Microsoft reported six months ago, in July 2021.

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Prior to that, the company used the metric of daily active users, so the numbers aren’t directly comparable, but they do show how the growth has slowed. Monthly numbers are more forgiving because users don’t need to use the product as frequently to move the needle. In daily active users, Teams jumped from 75 million in April 2020 to 115 million in October 2020 to 145 million in April 2021.

Teams competes with services including Slack, acquired by Salesforce last year for $27.7 billion, and the widely used Zoom video conferencing service. Microsoft launched a standalone version of Teams for small businesses in December, separate from other Office apps and services, posing a more direct threat to Zoom.

Nadella said on the earnings call that monthly usage of third-party apps and custom solutions in teams has growth ten-fold in the last two years, as evidence of how companies are using Teams in a way that’s central to their work. He cited new and updated Teams apps from Atlassian, monday.com, SAP and Workday.

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