Forum Discussion
Chat error in a company meeting
We've been testing some larger meetings in Teams and have had generally good performance. We ran into an unusual issue recently. We had about 125 people in the meeting and they were all invited directly from the meeting scheduled in the Teams app on Windows.
We were testing the chat function and several users were unable to access the chat. They got the error "Only team members can chat. Ask the team owner to make you a member."
The meeting was not associated with a team, individuals were invited just by adding them as attendees.
Screenshot attached of the error. Has anyone seen this before?
ArtMarshall I have found that most chats will allow 249 participants. If you have a meeting with a large number of participants or a meeting that is created from a reoccurring invitation where participants haven't left the chat, you will get the error you described.
If you open the chat from the Chat icon, you can see the number of people in the chat at the top right. If you select this icon you can remove some individuals from the chat and add others. I typically will go through and remove those not currently online as they are most likely not active in the meeting. We will then add the individuals which are receiving the error. It still limits to the 249, but seems to be the best workaround.
We are also seeing this issue, particularly on an all-hands type call with around 150-200 people. I've tried disconnecting and reconnecting during the meeting but it didn't resolve the issue. Some attendees can use the chat, others get the error message. I'll raise a ticket but this will be really difficult to replicate for the engineer as it only seems to happy with large Teams meetings.
Is anyone of you sure that there is no channel added or O365 group involved this this anyhow. This looks very much a case when you have a meeting from channel and attendees are not members of channel.
Petri-X I think you're on to something with adding the Channel as at least part of the issue.
We just experienced this Chat Error issue for the first time on 6/18 in five meetings that we set up for training that day. Each of the meetings had 35 to 50 people in them. We set up the meetings using the Calendar in the Teams app to invite everyone. We added a channel to the meeting using the "Add Channel" field. The people in the meeting who were not added to the Team could not use the Chat in the meeting. We did not want to add everyone to the Team and the program does not let you add people only to a Channel within a Team.
We had previously had other training sessions like this two weeks ago, but they were set up through the Outlook Calendar and no Channel was added. Everyone in those meetings could use the Chat function just fine.
Next week we have a few more training Meetings that we are setting up. We were planning on setting them up through the Teams app using the Calendar and NOT add the Channel to see if that resolves the problem. Hopefully it does.
There is DEFINITELY no group/channel involved. While you're point makes sense, this is exactly the problem.
In my scenario, it was a calendar invite to everyone in the company and it was not posted to any Team/Channel. There were three meetings. The first had 130 people and 2 reported having the issue. I had no reports of this issue in the second (140 ppl) or third (50 ppl) meeting.
These two people did not join as guests and they were not external. I have heard that leaving and rejoining resolves the issue, but I have not had another opportunity to test because this issue is fairly rare. (I need to look into local client logs... hmm...)
Have you success to get the diagnostic logs from Teams while this is happening? Especially in a way it covers joining to the meeting and having the error.
But troubleshooting issue which requires 150+ users in the test meeting. That is challenging indeed 🙂
Petri-X While some of the participants in this thread are not experiencing the same issue, I can confidently say that several of us first-hand have experienced this appear in normal meetings, and is very intermittent and tough to reproduce in a lab, as it usually affects meetings with a large number of participants. I've personally witnessed this in at least one meeting at my organization.
ArtMarshall
Three weeks ago we had a meeting with about 80 participants and the same issue. But there is only this on time this has happened. For sure most meetings has less participants. I spoke to some of them and they told me that they left the meeting and entered again.
Was the same message for some users:
They got the error "Only team members can chat. Ask the team owner to make you a member."Running into this issue as we speak using Teams for class. A colleague in the same meeting is using the desktop app while I am using the web version. Chat seems to be working properly for him on the desktop app. Perhaps the web client is the problem? I will be installing the desktop app for my next meeting to check if this is the case.
ArtMarshall same problem experienced just now - meeting outside a team - 36 participants - 2 can't participate in chat - all apparently joined following the same 'Join Now' link from a meeting invite.
- Did restarting the client app help?
- I just had 2/140 people in an internal webinar have this issue.
Is this not by design?
This tech note from a knowledge base, suggests it is, and is just down to whether an individual is a member of the right team:
No, not when you don't create the meeting in a Team or channel.
And that is (at least in my case) what is happening. So we don't have a team or channel to become a member of.
We have seen this issue a number of times during the work at home period. We only have internal users, no guests, joining our meetings. Also not too many participants (like 160- 230 persons in one meeting).
The work around (leave + re-join) works, but it is not really cool...
ArtMarshall
I've had the same thing - trying to participate in a third-party Teams conference call, Chat greyed outArtMarshall Same problem for us, basically same circumstances. All hands meetings or larger (> 20) meetings and we are random behavior of a handful of users not being able to see the chat / getting the same message. When they reconnect, they can successfully get access. Wonder if it's something throttling related.
JimBakerSame issue here too. Using the Teams meeting as a webinar, found that a bunch of users get the same error. Exchange Online and Teams. Unable to reproduce it myself via three different computers during the meeting.
WilliamsJK2 It's the weirdest thing. I've been having this issue for the past 4 days now and can't get rid of it. It happens for me like this: When I go to calendar on teams > create a meeting > add an attendee, the meeting gets created and I can send the meeting link to anyone and they can join as guest where the chat works fine. The problem happens when I do the same process, but also add the meeting to a team's channel. Once I add the meeting to the channel, it gets created, but guest can't use the chat function. I've gone through all the guest settings, but no changes I've made worked.
We've had several additional meetings since our test and the problem has not recurred. The only change that I'm aware of is that we moved from our standalone Exchange server to Office 365 online. I'd be curious to see if others who are having the problem are running standalone Exchange (or other) email servers.
- Hi Art - when we experienced this problem, all mailboxes were located in Exchange Online. We still maintain hybrid for management, but all mailboxes and public autodiscover is set to Exchange Online.
I have not heard of this issue re-appearing yet either, but we don't always get all the reports. I'm still working with MS Support and will update if I get any usable information.
