Microsoft cloud and collaboration services witnessed a significant spike in usage over the past week as organizations continue to deal with an increase in remote workers due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. That spike has forced the cloud giant to tweak some of its services in order to deal with the increased load.

Microsoft said that it has seen a 775% increase in the use of its cloud services in areas operating under enforced social distancing or shelter-in-place orders. Most of those areas are in larger cities and states that also happen to be larger business centers.

Microsoft had previously stated that it was prioritizing cloud traffic for first responders, emergency routing and reporting applications, medical supply management and delivery systems, health screening applications and websites, and health management applications and record systems. The prioritization process includes temporary limits on free offers to prioritize capacity for existing customers. Microsoft explained that these “soft” quota limits are typically isolated to specific regions that are seeing increased traffic and that customers impacted can use alternative regions to get around any performance hits.

Microsoft did admit to degradation in the deployment of some compute resource types across some regions. That degradation included a “drop below our typical 99.99% success rates.”

“Although the majority of deployments still succeed … we have a process in place to ensure that customers that encounter repeated issues receive relevant mitigation options,” the company noted. “We treat these short-term allocation shortfalls as a service incident and we send targeted updates and mitigation guidance to impacted customers via Azure Service Health – as per our standard process for any known platform issues.”

Microsoft said that its Teams collaboration service has “seen a very significant spike” in usage and counted more than 44 million daily users generating more than 900 million meeting and calling minutes per day. It also reported that use of its Windows Virtual Desktop feature has increased 300%.

To deal with the load on its Teams platform, Microsoft has adjusted “non-essential capabilities” to help manage service quality. These include how often it checks for user presence, the time between when it shows when users are typing, and video resolution.

Microsoft Teams suffered a temporary outage across parts of Europe earlier this month. The hiccup was blamed on a caching issue within a part of its infrastructure.

Microsoft admitted at that time that despite its efforts to prevent problems, unexpected peaks in demand due the spread of the virus may create temporary issues. “While we’re actively monitoring and adding capacity as needed, you might feel impact until we’re able to add capacity in those areas,” the company wrote in a statement.

Other collaboration platforms like Cisco’s Webex and Zoom have seen similar surges in network traffic tied to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Cisco reported earlier this month that Webex traffic from China had increased by more than 2,000% since the outbreak began and that more than 30% of its enterprise customers have reached out for help getting their employees set up to work from home.

UPDATE: Microsoft has since corrected its initial statement to note that the 775% increase in cloud usage was actually from Microsoft’s Teams calling and meeting monthly users over a one-month period in Italy. We have a new story on that correction here.