Unable to travel home, Microsoft staff slept in data centres during COVID-19 lockdown: Executive

During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Microsoft employees slept in the company's data centres, according to Kristen Roby Dimlow, a Microsoft Human Resources Executive. 

"In certain countries, there was huge lockdown...so we'd have our employees choose to sleep in the data centre," she said. "They were worried they'd get stuck at a roadblock, trying to go home," she said.

Remote working was impossible for some Microsoft employees in technical roles. Some employees at sites that house servers for Microsoft's online services, such as Microsoft Teams, were among those affected, CNBC reported. 

If data-centre staff didn't want to come on-site during the epidemic, the corporation allowed them to work from home as much as possible.

Data centres, on the whole, are not locations where people sleep. Aisles can be hot from the air coming off servers and cold from the air conditioning used to keep the machines from overheating. 

Greenpeace published a report in 2011 that ranked the top 10 cloud computing companies based on the sources of electricity used in their data centres.

Data centres consumed up to 2% of all worldwide electricity at the time, and this figure was expected to rise. 

(With inputs from agencies)