Microsoft Teams hits 20 million daily active users as Slack falters

Microsoft announced Tuesday its Teams communication app now has over 20 million daily active users. That’s almost 54% from Microsoft’s prior announcement about the app usage. Introduced in 2016, just two years after the launch of Slack, Microsoft Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform app that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration. Slack shares dropped by as much as 10% on Tuesday following Microsoft’s announcement and closed down 8.4%.

In July, Microsoft said Teams had more than 13 million daily active users, more than the 10 million Slack had in the three months that ended on Jan. 31. Teams has more than 20 million daily active users. Slack, on the other hand, had around ten million daily active users and 85,000 paid organization users as of January 2019.

According to Microsoft’s announcement, Teams’ users are very engaged. They started out with simple text-based chat, they quickly move on to richer forms of communication and collaboration. Just last month, Teams customers participated in more than 27 million voice or video meetings and performed over 220 million open, edit, or download actions on files stored in Teams.

The announcement is good news for the Microsoft’s Office 365 subscription-based productivity bundle, a key part of today’s Microsoft alongside the Azure public cloud.  Slack shares were down as much as 10% on Tuesday following Microsoft’s announcement and closed down 8.4%. The shares are down more than 18% since the company’s debut on the public market in June, and down almost 50% from their first-day peak.

However, Slack remains very upbeat about the future of the company. A Slack spokesperson told CNBC in an email on Tuesday, saying: “Slack continues to see unmatched engagement on our platform with 5+ billion weekly actions, including 1+ billion mobile actions.”