Microsoft made a significant clarification of a weekend update it put out touting the increased use of its cloud services during the current COVID-19 virus outbreak.

The cloud giant originally noted that it had seen a 775% increase in the use of its cloud services in areas operating under enforced social distancing or shelter-in-place orders. It has since altered the update to clarify that the increase was actually from Microsoft’s Teams calling and meeting monthly users over a one-month period in Italy.

Microsoft’s public relations team sent out an email last night noting the error and stating that “Microsoft was not as clear as they intended to be with the previous statement.”

Italy has been hard-hit by the COVID-19 outbreak, with the World Health Organization (WHO) reporting more than 97,000 cases in that country. That is second in the world only behind the United States.

The original Microsoft statement was at least correct in that social distancing or shelter-in-place orders were in effect in that area. And it should be given some credit for copping to the error by keeping the original misinformation in the update, though updated with a strikethrough across the inaccurate stat.

Microsoft did not provide an explanation on the mix-up or as to the actual usage it was witnessing across its cloud services.

The company 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 had also reported that its Teams 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. 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.

The company this week also announced that it would be expanding the Teams platform to consumers as part of its broader 365 subscription service. Microsoft said the consumer version of the service would begin to roll out in preview over the coming months.