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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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..
I could use the browser version for that.
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.
Has how we used these tools just changed? They are so janky in the first place that them being "down" is questionably different?
Just seems weird.
It crashes randomly. It cuts off text when you start typing. It is terrible.
A sort of software Stockholm syndrome?
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.
If it weren't for MS being a monopoly I doubt we'd use it
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.
Now tech folks are more dispersed across several social media platforms so it’s harder to see trends.
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.
At the very least Microsoft could have given us some system-wide notification that there were problems...
Anyway, this is what status pages are for: https://admin.microsoft.com/servicestatus (currently showing a whole lotta information about problems with Microsoft Teams).
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!
1:23 Coworker: Hello
1:24 Me: Hello
[20 minutes elapse]
1:44 Me: Did you need something?
[No notifications until leave for the day]
[Checks back hours later and the conversation appears as]
1:23 Coworker: Hello
1:24 Me: Hello
1:25 Coworker: Could you herp the derp?
1:30 Coworker: Nm got Mo to herp the derp.
1:44 Me: Did you need something?
1:45 Coworker: Nah I'm good.
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..
I would have assumed this: https://status.office365.com/ but it shows nothing useful.
https://portal.office.com/servicestatus At least this one shows there's an issue.
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
Weirdly, I am unable to hide an entire conversation, which is something I didn't think would require a round trip to the backend.
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.