I got my first taste of teams about a month ago. I had to install it on my personal laptop for a job interview. After installation, my laptop started displaying notifications encouraging me to renew my monthly subscriptions to Microsoft Office and Xbox Game Pass, things I haven't had a subscription for in over a year. It automatically set itself to start up with the computer which isn't unexpected. However I disabled the startup and it still launches when Windows restarts. Only solution was to remove it. I don't know why people waste their time using teams, it's such a trash app written by a trash company.
> I don't know why people waste their time using teams
Because its use is mandated by workplaces, schools, and lots of other entities & communities. I rather hate Teams, but suddenly I’m finding myself spending half my days with it.
And those places use it because it’s free. You’re already paying for Exchange or Office, so Teams comes free. Nobody believes it’s the best product, but it’s 70% as good as Slack for free.
You are absolutely right. To me this kind of bundling is absolutely infuriating. I wish we could literally outlaw it.
At work we just transfered from zoom to google meet. We did this while everyone who expressed an opinion agreed that zoom is simply a superior product. And we did it because “we are already paying for it with our google docs subscription”.
It is just so anti-competitive I can’t even believe we collectively let this happen.
What's the alternative though? I don't like anti-competitive behavior at all, however thinking about what the regulation would be, I am just not sure there is any viable way. You have a few cases where the EU will go after whoever for bundling a browser, which is not really a solution. Are companies only allowed to sell products individually and never discount or bundle anything? What is a "complete" product? Is it Office? Word? Windows? - Which the EU has already said is conglomerate of products given the whole IE thing. It seems tricky.
I don’t see how it’s anticompetitive. It’s not like Microsoft or Google make it harder to use Slack or Zoom.
In fact, Google makes it really easy to integrate Zoom into Google calendar, and Microsoft has slack integrations for all their products. One can even argue that the office experience in slack is better than in Teams.
Offering a product for free or a significant discount with another product where a company has a substantial portion of that market to get a foothold and kill off competition in the free-/cheap-product's market is called "bundling" in anticompetitive regulations.
Indeed, this is exactly what is happening with Teams compared to, say, Slack (which is generally regarded as the better team chat) or Zoom (better video conferencing).
This link doesn’t say what you’re saying it does. From the link:
> For competitive purposes, a monopolist may use forced buying, or "tie-in" sales, to gain sales in other markets where it is not dominant and to make it more difficult for rivals in those markets to obtain sales. This may limit consumer choice for buyers wanting to purchase one ("tying") product by forcing them to also buy a second ("tied") product as well.
Teams is free, whether it’s obtained with Office or downloaded separately.
Giving away a product for free doesn’t violate anti competition regulations.
I switched companies and I had to use teams. From my experience coming Slack, teams feels heavy app. The bootup is slow and overall it felt like its bloated app. I'm using M1Pro Mac.
What I don't like the most of the teams app is, the freaking code editor. If I paste code in teams, it feels hard to read, in Slack it looks much better. Also, I hate it when on teams having some serious chat about prod issue and some in the group post a random message and whole thing just goes side ways. Lack of threads is bad experience for me. I can go on..
For those who don’t know, you can use Teams entirely in a browser. I use Teams all day at work and have never installed the client application. I just load up teams.microsoft.com in Chrome. Works great.
I'd stop short of claiming it works "great," but it is indeed usable and I'd second this recommendation if you're forced to use Teams. The "app" is just electron anyway.
Look its not hard to disable the autostart you just got to interrupt on boot and get into the bios settings, from their boot a minimum os of your preference and mount onto the windows partition. Find the registry and kick up the 4d3d3d3.
Teams is buggy and the native client is less buggy than the browser version.
Also, the browser version doesn’t have all the features of the native.
So if I’m in an interview, I want to make sure that as much as possible works. If I was just joining a conference call or something I would use the browser.
What I find most interesting about this is how long it took to see reporting on this issue, unlike what I remember the reporting on Slack being down 5 or 6 years ago that I could fairly reliably find somewhere that said it was down.
Has how we used these tools just changed? They are so janky in the first place that them being "down" is questionably different?
Yeah, I noticed Teams messages being out of order (and being re-incorrectly-ordered multiple times) this morning and didn't think anything of it. I hadn't seen that particular bug before but it didn't stand out from the normal background jank.
The place I work at now uses Teams, and I legitimately didn't notice anything amiss.
- Channels randomly taking several minutes to load or outright refusing to load? Normal
- Calls dropping on a fast, stable ethernet connection? Normal
- Messages not sending, or appearing to send but silently never arriving/being dropped upon arrival? Normal
- Messages double- and triple-sending? Normal
- Messages being sent out-of-order? Normal
- Messages sending extremely slowly? Normal
- Attachments not loading? Normal
- Teams deciding logging in is just too difficult and I have to restart it at least once? Normal
I remember when I got an email today about an apparently outage describing all of the above (minus the call instability), I was like "wait, it's not supposed to be like this?"
And now that I type this out, especially having used Slack in the past, I realize what an indictment of Teams that is. (But I've also worked at a place that used Lync/Skype for Business/whatever they're calling it now, and it still manages to be pleasant compared to that mess. Though I won't give MS any credit there; the bar was on the floor, and they managed to avoid tripping over it.)
And yet companies don't mind the extremely obvious loss of productivity this causes. They also don't mind that it makes them look unprofessional. At all.
I've seen townhall meetings where 200+ FTE where sitting around waiting for Teams to stop glitching for like 10 minutes. And after they go back to their desk for real work, the glitching continues.
My previous employer forced us to use a Hip hat instance. It was legitimately hell, deleting history randomly and just atrocious. Using Teams now (switched jobs) it legitimately feels mystical in comparison.
I use Slack outside work, and it's less buggy than Teams but the feature count is dramatically lower. Maybe as I use it mostly with non-technical groups. Feels 'fine' but people seem to clamor for Discord.
My job use Slack and I find it quite frustrating. The UI could definitively need some work. Seems like they change the UI now and then but it doesn't really make it easier for me.
A million times this. Things seemed more broken than usual in Teams for me today like image attachments not working and such. I just figured it was Teams being Teams until someone informed me there was a service outage degrading things. That’s how low the bar is.
I think (in general) Slack has been more open to automations and integrations, so entire workflows rest on it.
Teams is catching up in this respect, but fewer people rely on it beyond day-to-day communication. Not that it's not important, but maybe just not as critical to things beyond person-to-person comms.
I disagree a bit: companies use it partly because it integrates with SharePoint, so a team can have a SharePoint folder easily. That often breaks down, because who needs access to that folder almost never maps to the team members, but it's enough to sell it to people to get their foot in the door, and after that they accept the hideous pain of changing it.
How is MS a monopoly when it comes to workspace tools? Seems to me there are plenty of alternatives and I am lucky enough that I never had to use it at work.
If your org uses Microsoft products, typically a Teams license is baked in (or at least was at some point). So when it comes to choosing a better tool vs Teams it is an easy decision for the bean counters - we're already paying for Teams, let's just use it.
I think it was because most people are used to Teams being an application with a poor experience, so a widespread degradation in service just looks like what people normally expect from Teams.
I know in the orgs that I work with, everyone today blamed any problems on Teams being a crappy application. No one thought twice about it being something more than that.
This was my experience. Teams was slow and functioning badly this morning, but it wasn't until someone else said they were also not seeing images that I realized it wasn't just typical jank. Teams is just not good to use in the first place so it doesn't occur to me to think I should check for outages whenever I have a problem.
I think especially with how Teams responded to this problem. It wasn't saying it couldn't connect or anything.
I had a few symptoms:
First teams froze my entire computer when I started it when it couldn't connect.
Then it finally loaded and a message I sent would appear in the preview on the left but not actually in the chat window (the preview where it shows the name list of chats I have).
Then messages would just sit with that circle sending, but I would receive messages occasionally.
A simple "can't connect" would have gone a long way.
Today was the first day, in the ~4 months that we've been using Teams and MS365 for our company, that anyone noticed an actual outage. I got an email about it from a colleague and they weren't aware of the outage (I wouldn't expect them to, this team is very non-technical). So I get to explain these types of things next week, that we can't really "fix" these issues, they will happen though.
But yea, Teams is janky. I wish I could say it was the worst thing I experienced at work, but, alas, that remains a wish and a dream.
This is because of the decline in use of Twitter. When a major platform went down, there was always a notable and reliable surge in tweets on that topic. Tech reporters had running searches that would surface such surges immediately.
Now tech folks are more dispersed across several social media platforms so it’s harder to see trends.
I didn't even look at HN because our yammer page had a post within a few minutes with a description of the issue, an ETA for a fix, and a time for a next update.
I don't know if the speed of a technical status update is related to how much we pay to MS, but it definitely feels that way.
I wouldn't have realized this issue if a coworker wasn't looking at my screen, seeing the messages they had sent 10 minutes prior just popping up. There was no way I could have known they were late because the timestamps in Teams were the time I received the messages instead of the time the messages were sent. On his end there was also nothing indicating that there was a delivery problem.
At the very least Microsoft could have given us some system-wide notification that there were problems...
How would that work? You'd get an in-app message in 40 minutes saying there's a problem 40 minutes ago?
Anyway, this is what status pages are for: https://admin.microsoft.com/servicestatus (currently showing a whole lotta information about problems with Microsoft Teams).
Status pages are nerd tools. Anyone that says otherwise is living in a bubble. Pretending momentarily that this is not true, you wouldn’t go to a status page if you thought that everything was fine. Not sure what is warranting such a kneejerk defence…
The implication is that the infra required to notify of an outage is lesser/different than what’s required to…run Teams. Publish it on DNS!
If you think everything is fine, presumably that's because every metric you have available is indicating fine-ness. That's probably sufficient for most users. There'll be some edge cases, but the brief write-up in some obscure IT online journal should suffice to restore anyone's slightly damaged reputation regarding a torpid non-committal response.
I'd also assume if you're using Microsoft Teams it's because someone else has determined that you shall use it. I expect that any semi-informed, mildly IT literate Microsoft Teams user has a starting position of 'low expectations'.
Anyway, parent was suggesting an in-app message to indicate some issues, so my initial question stands - how do you expediently send an instant message to a user to advise them that your instant messaging app is having a bad day?
As a sibling noted, messages on the receivers end are time-stamped with the receive time, not the send time.
To your specific suggestion, how do you identify if the messages arrived late because of a server-side issue, rather than a client-side, network disconnect, or some other non-infra issue?
Anyway, while I'm sure there's myriad ways that the authors of this app could have engineered it to be more resilient, self-reporting, etc - it's clear that they did not.
I feel this way too. Something about Microsoft office products makes my skin crawl. I remember back when Teams didn’t have native notifications either, oh man was that painful!
It is the worst tool by far on any computer I've used in the past 30 years.
Regularly disconnects Microsoft's own headsets and saturates CPU until the headset is unplugged and re-plugged, good job selling your products together without testing them.
Can't use triple backticks in messages for blocks of code anymore, it never works.
Can't always use single backtick either, unreliable at best.
Pasting will give crazy formatting sometimes and blocks of code sometimes, you can't choose when. Will regularly trim CRLFs, leaving you to input everything manually.
"Inserting" code (instead of pasting it like a normal person) makes the TITLE they force you to input take most of the space, it's like they thought long and hard about how to obfuscate useful information at every turn.
Switching tabs and conversations take a noticeable time, even on a decent beast (12th gen i7, rtx 3070ti, 64gb ddr4). Doing anything is sluggish in that app.
When on a call with somebody sharing their screen, can't hide the stupid vertical bar with names of other people taking 20% of the real estate.
Can't share more than one screen discord-style so half the time colleagues will be quickly shown something, and then have to be reminded to share their own screen again.
Link embeds are slow to parse, office embeds offer more options but are slow to open either in-app or in browser.
Speaking of links, any "copy link" is uncertain for users: sometimes it's a crappy useless popover, sometimes it's a link you don't realize the other user will need permission for, and sometimes it has copied without really notifying you. Awesome.
New teams is basically old teams but now your computer has twice the software and shortcuts.
Testing your sound setup requires a painfully slow call with the crappiest Skype-inspired bot, the test feedback itself being less than 30% of the entire time wasted
And the sound is just noticeably worse than literally every other service (Facebook messenger, Google calls, slack, discord..)
Once teams is on a computer, some magical shortcut (you will only ever press by mistake while doing other things) will pop up a window trying to get it integrated further into your O.S.
Searching for messages is extremely painful, there's no robust history in that bar at the top and you'll find yourself searching multiple times over sometimes, especially as you can't preview much so you try to find that one message from 6 months ago over and over again with new searches.
Setting appointments can't tweak the exact timing the way outlook's calendar does (down to 5min increments if wanted).
Can't pin more than a few teams. Good job making the tab that your app is named after the one people want to avoid the most.
I could go on but I'm not working today and already have enough sadness incurred by that horrible piece of junk 5 days a week..
Some users may experience multiple issues with their Microsoft Teams
TM710344, Last updated: Jan 26, 2024, 6:00 PM GMT-3
Estimated start time: Jan 26, 2024, 12:37 PM GMT-3
User impact
Users may experience multiple issues with their Microsoft Teams.
Title: Some users may experience multiple issues with their Microsoft Teams
User impact: Users may experience multiple issues with their Microsoft Teams.
More info: Affected scenarios include, but aren't limited to:
- Users performing a cold boot may not able to log into teams and will see an "oops" page
- Users logging in or unlocking their devices after some time may see missing messages
- Users may fail to load messages in channels and chats
- Users are unable to view or download their media (images, videos, audio, call recordings, code snippets)
- Some messages may experience delays being sent
- Call Recordings might take longer to appear in user's OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online
- Users may be unable to load previous Copilot history, or new history is not written
- Bots may be unable to download attachments
- Sending and receiving read receipt notifications may be delayed
- Anonymous users may be unable to join meetings
- Teams connectors for Power Automate/Power Apps may experiencing errors
Current status: Our failover operation did not provide the immediate relief intended for end users in North and South America regions. However, we’re monitoring telemetry closely as we continue to optimize traffic patterns and apply configuration changes intended to reduce customer impact as quickly as possible. We understand the impact an issue like this can have on your organization, and we appreciate your partnership and patience as we work to remediate this issue.
Scope of impact: This issue can potentially impact any Microsoft Teams user in the scenarios outlined in the More info section.
Start time: Friday, January 26, 2024 at 11:55 AM GMT-3
.
Next update by: Friday, January 26, 2024 at 7:00 PM GMT-3
The service health page of the 365 admin center. Normal users won't have access to those though, best place for reliable updates in that case is the X account from the article.
That page indicates that "Teams (Consumer)" is having an issue, but my enterprise version is also fubar'd. Messages are coming through, but with a 30 minute delay. A person's status is not realtime.
Weirdly, I am unable to hide an entire conversation, which is something I didn't think would require a round trip to the backend.
It is appalling that the M365 PG resists the transparency that Azure has - no login required to see status & publicly accessible post incident reports. The best they have is an unverified Xitter account.
It's always interesting to hear others experiences. I've used Teams for 4+ years now with zero issues until this morning. I'm only mad in that I tried troubleshooting my PC and network connection for far too long before seeing this thread.
Yeah, it's free. Somehow that's competitive, even though it forced Slack to sell up, but iPhone having a 20% global smartphone market share is anticompetitive.
Yeah it’s odd how that works, I have a similar experience with the appletv YouTube app people complain about and it led me to wondering how it ends up working out that way.
That being said in regards to teams, it might literally be the worst software I’ve ever used. It’s a major thorn in the productivity not just of myself, but everyone including the entire org of my client who mandates it. Like not a day goes by it doesn’t impact one or more meetings. It’s bizzare how tolerated it is when everyone involved has issues that leads to them disliking it.
I haven’t really had problems with it not working. Not more than other chat programs.
My main gripe is the “teams” chats having aggressively terrible UI in ways that make my work-life worse. Most of my complaints would go away if they let me make a teams chat that was a normal chat room.
Same here, hp switched to Teams a while back and it's been working great until today. Also think we should have gotten an alert earlier. I switched to my phone app, that kept working for a bit but now it's total blackout.
Yeah the biggest issue I've had with Teams is that I don't like the icon on the 'new' app. I guess we have enough glitches with starting screen shares (it's not frequent or a cause of extended disruptions, but it shouldn't ever happen either).
I am sheepishly going to chime in and say I recognize many of ms teams shortcomings but I actually cringe when I have to join meetings on zoom or god forbid, webex. Joining meetings in teams and sharing screen works decently well for me and I do it enough that I am fairly satisfied with it.
Could it be lighter weight? Yeah for sure. But I am definitely not running into the same issues that some people are seeing on this thread.
What I have recognized is that if you don't have teams installed and have to join a teams meeting via your browser, it might work like 10% of the time.
I think they’ve improved since 2021, but back then when someone sent me a webex invitation I’d feel secondhand embarrassment for them. It was BY FAR the worst of the videoconferencing platforms despite having a huge head start.
The only difference I've noticed is that I no longer get notifications that meetings have started, and also no longer have the ability to check if a meeting has started.
Teams is garbage in lots of other ways too. Recently, when I end a teams meeting from the browser (in chrome), it will keep a zombie process going that will hit 100% CPU. Luckily my laptop reminds me of this after a few minutes because the fans go to turbojet mode. Closing chrome doesn't kill it. And it's not enough to kill chrome in the task manager, because it will reappear when I start chrome again. I have to force stop it in the chrome task manager first.
Huh. Here I thought I'd totally lost my mind because every time I open teams on my phone it takes down my cellular connection. As in I can't use teams on my phone because it instant disconnects me from the Visible network. I thought I was losing my mind until I found other people with the problem.
I've been using msteams against my will for years now. Everytime I experience a brand new bug I've not seen before, and would have expected to have seen it regularly if it were not a new bug, there are people complaining about from 2020.
We started seeing signs of issues Wednesday and Thursday with messages being out of order or disappearing and reappearing. Today has been much worse. Not even able to send images (though thankfully gifs still work lol).
Not sure if it is related, but in the same time period, Microsoft Family Safety has been flaky. My son will request more Xbox / PC time, I’ll get the notification, but inside the app there is no request to approve. Or I’ll get another notification hours later.
The MS Family stuff has all been broken through the app for me for the past 2-3 months - I get the notifications, get the buttons to approve, and click works, everything seems normal - but nothing ever happens on the Xbox end. I just gave up on it.
I've been using Teams for a few years, at a small company with (in my admittedly parochial opinion) an uncommonly competent and diligent IT department, and it still vexes me. I've seen intermittent stuff along similar lines as this "outage" for as long as I've been using it, but the severity is normally such that it's just the tiniest bit of friction, easily overcome by our team's trust that we're not using it as an excuse to be unresponsive. Usually it works fine. Often enough that it's annoying, presence or meeting status refuses to update until I poke the UI hard enough, with "enough" seemingly varying with the phase of the moon. I sometimes watch the little circle in the corner of my icon wondering: is it enough to unlock my Windows desktop? To hover over the Teams window at all? To hover over something that forces it to redraw? To click the window and give it input focus? To reboot my DSL modem? Do the developers of the client (or the Azure message bus backend, or whatever alchemy they're doing over in Redmond) even know the answer?
It's inexplicable that a critical service such as Teams goes down in multiple geographies simultaneously - unless the root cause is an attacker who knew exactly where to push.
