Updated October 2026: This post has been expanded from its original September 2020 version from a single infographic into a sourced look at the numbers Microsoft reported for Office 365, Microsoft 365 and Teams during 2020, with charts and context. It is a historical account; details describe the time it covers, not today.
2020 was the year office software became the office. When the COVID-19 pandemic pushed millions of people to work and study from home in March, Microsoft's productivity tools were suddenly carrying meetings, classes and entire companies. The numbers Microsoft shared that year, especially for Teams, showed growth that would normally take several years compressed into a few months.
The original version of this post shared a third-party infographic. This update replaces it with figures Microsoft itself reported in its earnings releases, executive statements and official blog posts during 2020, along with reputable coverage of those announcements. It also explains what the different metrics actually measure, because "users," "seats" and "participants" are not the same thing.
Teams: the breakout story of 2020
Microsoft Teams launched in 2017 as a chat-based workspace for businesses. By November 2019, Microsoft said it had about 20 million daily active users. Then the pandemic hit.
- March 2020: In a March 19 blog post, Jared Spataro, then corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, said Teams had passed 44 million daily users. Twelve million of those had been added in just the previous seven days. Users were generating more than 900 million meeting and calling minutes per day.
- April 2020: On Microsoft's April 29 earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said Teams had reached 75 million daily active users. He added that Teams had more than 200 million meeting participants in a single day that month, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes.
- October 2020: On the October 27 earnings call, Nadella reported 115 million daily active users, more than 50% higher than in April.
Microsoft also highlighted large deployments. In April it said 20 organizations with more than 100,000 employees were using Teams, and that Accenture had become the first to pass half a million users. By July 2020, according to the Microsoft 365 for IT Pros analysis of that quarter's results, 69 organizations had more than 100,000 Teams users and 1,800 had more than 10,000.
Office 365 by the numbers
Teams was only one part of the picture. On the April 2020 earnings call, Nadella said Office 365 had 258 million paid commercial seats. Meanwhile, Microsoft's quarterly reports showed steady growth in both business revenue and consumer subscriptions throughout the year.
| Quarter (ended) | Microsoft total revenue | Office 365 Commercial revenue growth | Consumer subscribers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 31, 2019 | $36.9 billion | 27% | 37.2 million |
| Mar 31, 2020 | $35.0 billion | 25% | 39.6 million |
| Jun 30, 2020 | $38.0 billion | 19% | 42.7 million |
| Sep 30, 2020 | $37.2 billion | 21% | 45.3 million |
| Dec 31, 2020 | $43.1 billion | 21% | 47.5 million |
Source: Microsoft quarterly earnings press releases (fiscal Q2 2020 through fiscal Q2 2021). Growth rates are year over year, in U.S. dollars. Consumer subscribers were reported as Office 365 Consumer until the April 2020 rename to Microsoft 365 Consumer.
The consumer numbers rose by more than 10 million subscribers over the year, as households set up home offices and students moved to remote learning. On the business side, Microsoft said seat growth for Office 365 Commercial was 15% in the quarter ending June 2020.
"Two years of digital transformation in two months"
The phrase that came to define Microsoft's 2020 came from that April earnings call. Nadella said the company had seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months, as customers rushed to enable remote work. Beyond Teams, he pointed to usage of Windows Virtual Desktop tripling during the quarter.
The rapid growth also put pressure on Microsoft's cloud. The company added capacity across its services to keep up with demand, and its commercial cloud revenue reached $13.3 billion in the March quarter, according to the Microsoft 365 for IT Pros analysis. By the end of fiscal 2020 in June, Microsoft's annual commercial cloud revenue had passed $50 billion.
Office 365 becomes Microsoft 365
In the middle of all this, Microsoft also changed the names of its subscriptions. On March 30, 2020, it announced that several Office 365 plans would be renamed Microsoft 365 starting April 21, 2020.
Consumer plans
Office 365 Personal and Home subscriptions became Microsoft 365 Personal and Microsoft 365 Family. In the U.S. the plans were priced at $6.99 and $9.99 per month, with Family covering up to six people. Alongside the rename, Microsoft announced new features, including the AI-powered Microsoft Editor for writing suggestions, Presenter Coach for practicing PowerPoint presentations, a Family Safety app for parents, and a consumer version of Teams later in 2020.
Business plans
For small and medium businesses, Microsoft renamed four offerings, with no pricing or feature changes at the time:
- Office 365 Business Essentials became Microsoft 365 Business Basic.
- Office 365 Business Premium became Microsoft 365 Business Standard.
- Microsoft 365 Business became Microsoft 365 Business Premium.
- Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus became Microsoft 365 Apps, labeled "for business" or "for enterprise."
The rename caused some confusion, because the "Business Premium" label moved from one bundle to another. Anyone comparing plans from 2019 and 2020 documents should check the feature list rather than rely on the name.
How to read these numbers
Productivity statistics are easy to misread, because companies use different measures at different times:
- Daily active users (DAU) counts people who used a product on a given day. It is a strong measure of engagement. Microsoft used DAU for Teams throughout 2020.
- Monthly active users (MAU) counts anyone who used a product at least once in a month, so it is always larger than DAU. When Microsoft later switched Teams reporting to MAU, the numbers were not directly comparable with the 2020 DAU figures.
- Paid seats counts licenses that organizations pay for. A paid seat is not necessarily in active use, so the 258 million Office 365 figure is a measure of reach, not daily activity.
- Meeting participants can count the same person more than once if they join several meetings in a day. In April 2020, rival Zoom first described a figure of 300 million daily users, then changed the wording to 300 million meeting participants.
When you see a usage statistic, check which measure it is, the exact date, and whether it comes from the company itself or a third-party estimate.
What happened next
Teams kept growing after 2020. Microsoft reported 145 million daily active users in April 2021, and in July 2021 it said Teams had passed 250 million monthly active users. The pandemic-era habits of video meetings and shared online documents largely stuck, even as many workplaces returned to offices part time.
The Microsoft 365 name also stuck. The consumer and business bundles introduced in April 2020 became the foundation of Microsoft's subscription lineup in the years that followed.
What this means for you today
If you used Office 365 or Teams for the first time in 2020, a few practical points still apply:
- Check which plan you actually have. Sign in to your Microsoft account and look at your subscriptions. Plan names changed in 2020, and features and prices have been adjusted since, so don't rely on an old receipt or a plan name you remember.
- Review family sharing. If you pay for a Family plan, confirm who it is shared with and remove anyone who no longer needs it.
- Clean up old Teams and files. Many organizations created hundreds of teams, chats and shared folders in a hurry in 2020. Archiving or deleting ones that are no longer used makes it easier to find what matters and reduces the chance of sharing sensitive files with the wrong people.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication. The more of your work and personal life runs through a single Microsoft account, the more important it is to protect that account with a second sign-in factor.
Sources
- Redmond Channel Partner: Microsoft Teams usage, March 2020
- Redmond Channel Partner: Microsoft Teams usage rips higher, April 2020
- Redmond Magazine: Microsoft Teams is on fire
- Windows Central: Microsoft Teams surges to 115 million daily active users
- Microsoft 365 for IT Pros: Teams powers Office 365 growth (April 2020)
- Microsoft 365 for IT Pros: Microsoft cloud growth, FY20 Q4
- Morung Express (IANS): We saw 2 years of digital transformation in 2 months
- Microsoft Investor Relations: FY20 Q2 earnings release
- Microsoft Investor Relations: FY20 Q3 earnings release
- Microsoft Investor Relations: FY20 Q4 earnings release
- Microsoft Investor Relations: FY21 Q1 earnings release
- Microsoft Investor Relations: FY21 Q2 earnings release
- Microsoft 365 Blog: New Microsoft 365 offerings for small and medium-sized businesses
- BleepingComputer: Office 365 rebrands as Microsoft 365
- AppleInsider: Microsoft 365 subscription offers AI assistance
- Windows Central: Microsoft Teams now has 250 million monthly active users
Top image: "Brooklyn Home Office, Minimized, At Night" by Mackenzie Kosut, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (resized). Charts by Thank You Robot.
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