Posted on 11/12/2026 2:27:33 PM PST by DFG
U.S. — National productivity skyrocketed on Thursday after Microsoft Teams went down, affording millions of Americans the rare opportunity to actually do their jobs.
Thousands of corporate meetings were canceled due to the outage, leading to an unprecedented spike in employee performance.
"It's been years since I was able to come to work and actually do my job," said local man Brian Mercer. "I've had a dozen projects piling up since last spring, which all get changed every time there's another meeting. All it took was one day without any input, and they're all done."
The remarkable burst of productivity sparked panic among middle managers, who suddenly had no reliable way to determine whether their employees were working.
"I can't see anyone's little green dot," said department supervisor Karen Whitmore. "People keep sending me finished work, but where is the dot? How can we possibly achieve synergy without the monitoring of green dots?"
Microsoft assured customers that engineers were working urgently to address the situation.
"We're aware of all the work being done during the outage," a company spokesperson said. "We understand how frustrating this is, and promise to put a stop to all that work just as soon as possible."
At publishing time, Teams had come back online, shutting down national productivity until the next Microsoft outage.
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I've always hated feature creep about as much as Stacey Abrams hates a Weight Watchers meeting.
This reminds me of early on when I was puzzled why FR traffic died off after work hours instead of increasing, I mentioned it on a thread, and everyone informed me that people were doing personal stuff on the computer while they were at work, something that I didn’t know at the time.
No kidding.
The bane of a business’s existence is unnecessary meetings, chasing rabbits down holes.
R. O. F. L.
My workplace uses it for micromanagement purposes. Once someone goes inactive the leadership uses it against them during their reviews. Yet, we are still at our desk reading hardcopy documentation rather than soft (pdf).
Never used teams but i can laugh. I never liked any of microsoft stuff, except i did a huge project and used microsoft project to manage about 50 people. That was the about the 2003 version. It seemed to get unwieldy after about 2 years of software upgrades. as all software that microsoft stole/bought then changed.
I had to laugh about this. My home Outlook is down, and it freed me to go out and do a bunch of errands.
Teams wasn’t down for my company but Outlook was/is.
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