When possible, the world is largely staying home and turning to remote work or distance-learning. As a result, Hangouts Meet and other Google products have seen tremendous “surges” in usage amid the coronavirus pandemic.
According to Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian yesterday, daily usage of Hangouts Meet is 25 times what it was in January. Over the last few weeks, day-over-day growth has surpassed 60%.
As more and more businesses rely on connecting an at-home workforce to maintain productivity, we’ve seen surges in the use of Google Meet, our video conferencing product, at a rate we’ve never witnessed before.
Launched in 2017, Meet is Google’s video conferencing solution for enterprise and requires G Suite to access, unlike classic Hangouts before it. Google in February temporarily made premium features available to all paid customers, including meetings with up to 250 participants, livestreaming within a domain to 100,000 viewers, and the ability to save calls to Google Drive.
Google continues to reiterate that this demand is “well within the bounds of our network’s ability.” Last week, the company said its systems are built to and can “handle the load” of coronavirus-related traffic.
Meanwhile, Google Classroom — a portal for teachers to communicate with students and vice versa — is seeing an uptick in usage. One notable example saw Google recently roll out the service to 1.3 million students in New York City.
More about Hangouts Meet:
- Google recommends these webcams and headsets for Hangouts Meet
- Google updates Hangouts Meet to give teachers more control over calls
- Hangouts Meet now supports Safari 13 and later on macOS
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