COVID-19: What Microsoft is doing to help

Microsoft has undertaken a number of initiatives to help during the pandemic. Some of these are:

• Ensuring that infrastructure and data centres are reliable, resilient and secure. Supporting critical health and safety organisations and ensuring continued productivity for remote workers. To this end, Microsoft has worked to ensure that governments around the world recognize data centre personnel as ‘essential’ in government policies.
• Teams, Microsoft’s online collaboration platform, introduced some new capabilities for video conferencing. These included real-time noise suppression to help people hear more clearly while on a video call, and a new integration with RealWear which allows workers to use head-mounted devices to communicate with remote experts from the job site.
• Microsoft has made its Teams software available free to all customers for six months, to enable online collaboration, video calling, online chats, audio calling and online file storage between parties.
• Providing support to educators, and sharing learnings on remote working and remote schooling with businesses and teachers. Announcing the launch of a section on the Minecraft Marketplace which contains free educational content.
• Creating an online COVID-19 tracker which shows where cases are around the world.
• Offering its Healthcare Bot to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can quickly assess symptoms and risk factors for people, provide information and suggest next steps such as calling a doctor.
• Participating in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. It will provide COVID-19 researchers around the world with access to High Performance Computing (‘supercomputer’) resources to help speed up the time taken to beat the novel coronavirus through scientific discovery. Microsoft and other partners have offered resources and free compute time.

In a LinkedIn blog post, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, said:

”No one company is going to solve a challenge like this alone, and it’s going to take the private and public sectors working together to turn the tide on COVID-19. Our unique role as a platform and tools provider allows us to connect the dots, bring together an ecosystem of partners, and enable organizations of all sizes to build the digital capability required to address these challenges. During this extraordinary time, it is clear that software, as the most malleable tool ever created, has a huge role to play across every industry and around the world. Our responsibility is to ensure that the tools we provide are up to the task.”

On 17 March, a joint statement was issued by Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube in which they pledged to elevate authoritative content across all their platforms and jointly combat fraud and misinformation about the coronavirus.

A joint industry statement on COVID-19 from Microsoft, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube: pic.twitter.com/uKEXvjMuBi

— Microsoft (@Microsoft) March 17, 2020

Microsoft Airband is an initiative to provide broadband to under-served rural communities. Actions taken to help during the pandemic for these customers across the United States include:

• Waiving fees for late payment and not terminating the service of customers unable to pay due to the current situation.
• Constructing public WiFi hotspots to provide community services in areas which need them. They are located in locations such as parking lots where users can remain safely in their vehicles while accessing online services.
• Committing to donate additional WiFi and access equipment, including TV white space (TVWS) equipment, to enable its Airband Partners to establish public access points at several hundred more locations across their coverage areas.

The initiative also operates internationally, and a number of Microsoft’s Airband Partners have taken steps to help in the areas they serve, including:

• Ghana: Bluetown is providing free access to health and education videos about Covid-19 prevention through partnerships with the WHO, the country’s government and Microsoft.
• India: AirJaldi is extending and providing free connectivity to quarantine centres during the country’s 21-day national lockdown.
• Kenya: Mawingu, Microsoft 4Afrika’s TVWS initiative, is providing connectivity to 174 healthcare clinics to enable them to better support patients in remote locations.
• Guatemala: New Sun Road (a global partner) is working with a group that has designed an open source ventilator to support testing of the ventilator in the country.
• Bangladesh, MESolshare (an Airband fund winner) is using its 3D printer to make face mask components for medics.

To learn more about what Microsoft is doing, click here.