India, April 2 -- Microsoft will offer its chat and video software Teams independently from its Office product internationally, the US tech giant announced on Monday, six months after unbundling the two products in Europe to avoid potential EU antitrust penalties.

The European Commission has been looking into Microsoft's integration of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint from the Salesforce-owned competitive workplace messaging tool Slack. Teams launched Office 365 for free in 2017, eventually supplanted Skype for Business and gained popularity throughout the epidemic, partly thanks to its video conferencing.

Previously, Microsoft included Teams with Office subscriptions, thus compelling consumers to utilise Teams if they wanted acc...