Microsoft Teams isn't going away as it hits another major milestone

Teams on iPhone and Mac
(Image credit: wichayada suwanachun / Shutterstock)

Microsoft Teams has almost doubled its customer base over the past 12 months to become one of the company's most widely-used products.

The video conferencing platform has seen a huge rise in users over the past year as employees around the world have been forced to work remotely, with Microsoft reaping the rewards.

In its recent financial results, the company revealed that Microsoft Teams now boasts 145 million daily active users - a huge rise from the 75 million it saw a year ago as the pandemic began to take hold.

Record Microsoft Teams numbers

Microsoft Teams has had to battle hard with competitors such as Zoom and Google Meet in the video conferencing space, but the platform appears to be sucking in new users at a serious rate.

In the pre-pandemic days of early 2020, Teams had around 32 million daily active users, and by October 2020 boasted around 115 million daily active users, showing the huge growth seen by the platform. 

Microsoft Teams hasn't been alone in massively expanding its user base during the pandemic, with its competitors also seeing significant increases. Zoom recently revealed it saw a 470% rise in business users with over 10 employees from the previous year, but has shied away from releasing daily active user numbers after been caught fudging its figures last year.

Microsoft is not resting on its laurels when it comes to the future of Teams, with dedicated buttons and tools for the service appearing in some of its recent hardware releases.

The company's new Surface Headphones 2+ for Business and Modern Wireless Headset and Modern USB Headset all feature dedicated Microsoft Teams buttons, suggesting that the software platform has a key role to play for the company going forward.

Microsoft Teams suffered a major outage earlier this week, the second in the space of just over a month, suggesting that user numbers are surging, and that the company may need to up its back-end systems in order to cope with this growing demand.

Mike Moore
Deputy Editor, TechRadar Pro

Mike Moore is Deputy Editor at TechRadar Pro. He has worked as a B2B and B2C tech journalist for nearly a decade, including at one of the UK's leading national newspapers and fellow Future title ITProPortal, and when he's not keeping track of all the latest enterprise and workplace trends, can most likely be found watching, following or taking part in some kind of sport.