Month: March 2020

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As America grapples with the most serious pandemic in decades, experts recommend social distancing as a way to limit the spread of the coronavirus. That means canceling events, closing schools, and working from home if possible. The fewer people who come into contact, the slower the virus will spread, and the less likely our health care system will get overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases.

Yet Meetup, a website devoted to facilitating meetings among strangers, is continuing to help its users organize face-to-face meetings.

Ordinarily, that's a laudable mission. Over the last 18 years, the site has helped organize thousands of social, professional, and educational events. But in the middle of a pandemic, a website devoted to encouraging people to have face-to-face meetings seems more than a little counterproductive.

Enlarge / This morning's Teams outage wasn't entirely limited to the European region whose traffic caused it. (credit: Downdetector)

This morning, Microsoft Teams was unavailable for many users for approximately two hours. This isn't the first high-profile Teams outage this year. Last month, Teams was down for several hours due to an expired TLS certificate.

This outage—which occurred at about 8:30am UTC—seems to have been due to high load caused by an unprecedented number of European users logging in to work remotely. Microsoft's communication so far has been extremely terse, announcing both the issue and its mitigation on Twitter while inviting Teams admins to examine the issue by number in the Admin Center.

Even for those who are Office 365 administrators and have access to the Admin Center, not much information was available. Many admins complained that issue TM206544 didn't show up in Admin Center at all; those who did copied and pasted the information there, but it wasn't particularly enlightening.

Enlarge / Headquarters of T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom in Bonn, Germany. (credit: Getty Images | Construction Photography/Avalon )

T-Mobile will borrow spectrum in the 600MHz band from Dish, Comcast, and other companies to boost mobile bandwidth during the coronavirus pandemic. The Federal Communications Commission yesterday granted T-Mobile temporary authority to use the spectrum for the next 60 days.

T-Mobile already has 600MHz-band licenses throughout the United States from a spectrum auction in April 2017. In that auction, T-Mobile spent $8 billion for 45 percent of the available spectrum, amounting to an average of 31MHz in each market. Dish spent $6.2 billion in that auction while Comcast spent $1.7 billion.

T-Mobile uses its 600MHz spectrum for both 4G and 5G. But unlike the millimeter-wave spectrum that has factored heavily into early 5G deployments, 600MHz is low-band spectrum that is suitable for covering large, sparsely populated areas.