GoKawiilMicrosoft is working to resolve a known issue that prevents some Microsoft Teams Free users from chatting and calling others.
Teams Free (also known as Teams for personal use) is a subscription-free version designed for individuals, families, and small community groups, which provides video conferencing, instant messaging, and collaborative file-sharing tools on mobile and desktop platforms for users with a Microsoft account.
The company blames these problems on a "recently deployed backend change" that skips the onboarding and privacy consent screens for some users, rendering their profiles inaccessible to others.
While it has yet to share which regions are affected and how many users are impacted by this incident, Microsoft says the first reports surfaced three weeks ago, on April 8.
Microsoft has also flagged this incident as a "service degradation," a label usually applied to issues with noticeable user impact that don't take the service offline.
"Some new users who signed up during the impact window were incorrectly treated as already onboarded, causing onboarding and privacy consent screens to be skipped, their profiles to appear as 'Unknown users' to others, and preventing them from being searchable or reliably reachable in chat," it said in a service health status update earlier today.
"We've identified a recently deployed backend change is causing new Teams Free users to bypass required onboarding steps, leaving user profiles in an incomplete state. As a result, affected users can not be discovered, connect with others, or successfully complete chat request flows."
Microsoft is still looking for a solution to this ongoing issue and has scheduled another update to share any additional details later today.
Last week, Microsoft acknowledged another issue that is preventing Windows users from joining Teams meetings due to a bug introduced by a recent Microsoft Edge browser update.
Earlier this month, it also reverted a recent service update that was blocking some customers from launching the Teams desktop client and leaving them stuck on the loading screen with the "We're having trouble loading your message. Try refreshing." error message.