Disabled users removed from Teams

[Raechel Moermond]

I have a customer that wants to know why a team owner was selected as having removed users from a team when he didn't remove them.  The scenario:

Three users were disabled in AD. They were not removed from syncing to O365.  My customer believes this removed them from all team sites.

One team has 12 owners and the activity for the team (user joined the team, user left the team, owner removed user from team) shows that OwnerD removed all 3 members from the team.  So my customer wants to know why that Owner was selected instead of one of the other 11 owners and how this selection process happens.  There is concern because that owner did not remove the users from the team and now there is a log stating he did.  If disabling the users is what cause them to be removed from the team (which to me, personally, does not make sense but all I got to work with is what I've been told has happened by the customer), why doesn't it say something like "system removed user from the team"?

I'm also looking into the O365 Log as well as talking to the customer to see if I can figure out what happened, but this owner is adamant that he did not remove these users from the team.

[#2]

@Raechel Moermond we have the same issue occurring as of Friday last week. Also seeing posts on the general channel for users being added by 'X', who definitely did not actually add them, including "unknown users". We're currently trying to understand why users are suddenly being added/removed, why some are showing as "unknown", and why Teams is claiming that a particular Teams owner has performed the action when they did not.

[#3]

@chai1900 From what I can tell, this event happened Wednesday for my customer.  I didn't get the notice from the customer until Friday, but I can see in the string of emails that it happened Wednesday.

[#4]

Thanks @Raechel Moermond . I've just checked some of the other Teams sites in our tenancy, and can see instances of users being added to a Team by an owner who did not add them, being logged as early as Tuesday 31st March. 

[#5]

@chai1900 

can you give me the links to any other posts?  It seems nobody has an answer to my question here, so i'm hoping there's something more on the other posts

[#6]

@Raechel Moermond 

As nobody got back to us I ended up running our own investigation with a third party. The best they could come up with was an update from Microsoft had caused a bug in the way that it reports additions and removals from a team when membership is managed automatically by an active directory group (and mistakenly reports that a Team owner performed an action). They suspect this will be fixed or patched later, but we are raising it with Microsoft anyway for more information.

We haven't been able to determine whether the Owner that teams picks in its message is a random owner, or determined by another factor.

[#7]

@Raechel Moermond We're also seeing this behavior. It's actually a very disruptive problem. Users are being furloughed or laid off. The "has left the team" announcements are already hurting moral. In addition not being able to suppress the announcements but now to having the appearance of coming from a random Team owner (and not an admin or service account) is REALLY upsetting people. 

Given the state of many businesses during this challenging time - this is an unbelievably cruel bug! 

[#8 · Accepted solution]

@chai1900  - I spoke with our team today regarding your question.  

Teams has some background workflows today that perform actions on behalf of existing owners when syncing changes from Groups to Teams. There is planned work to move this to a system context so it will not show up as a random owner doing it. I do not know the timeline at this time.

In addition, there is an ask to suppress the 'user left the team' message and we are doing some work to mitigate this so that information is not shown in the general channel as it is today. I urge you to vote on this UserVoice item if you agree that the join / removed names should not be listed in the General channel to everyone.  you can find that here: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/35515990-users-added-to-team-l... - The team is aware of this ask and working on that experience now - additional votes may influence timing of this one.  

Thank you for sharing the context for the ask.

[#9]

@Laurie Pottmeyer , I guess that's related to this old thread https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/how-can-we-hide-the-user-has-joined-left-the-...

[#10]

@Laurie Pottmeyer 

Will this also prevent a user whose sign in is blocked (BlockCredential:True) from being removed from a Team and its Channels? We expire accts in AD during vacation and map this to blocked sign in in AAD, and this is removing them from all their Teams!

[#11]

I've seen a similar issue before. After some initially investigation we found that the owner used wasn't random. But it was the first Owner, in the list of Owners within a Team listed via Team Admin Centre.

Change the first owner to a member, then the actions are performed by the next owner in the list.

[#12]

@Laurie Pottmeyer I'm wondering if there is any timeline for now?

We still encountered this issue that it randomly picked up the owner and stated that the owner remove the disabled user from the team.

[#13]

@Laurie Pottmeyercan you confirm that the link you've shared also includes the 'removal of users' message too, as it appears to only talk about those who have been added to a Team. I can see its got a few thousand votes, a few hundred comments already, and been open for 2 years already with lots of people complaining about it not being implemented yet - do you have any idea on what the timeline is likely to actually be?

I'm happy to vote of course, but this isn't a 'feature', its a system log publicly reporting to users that an individual has performed an action that they have not actually undertaken. That's a pretty severe bug, a huge obstacle to us using Teams (and I can see from the comments on the link you've shared it s a showstopper for lots of others too). We simply can't use big teams right now because of this bug - it's far too sensitive in a climate where people are being laid off due to economic pressures to then have Teams claiming that a particular Team Owner has removed someone from a team who has been made redundant, when they didn't do anything.

[#14]

@Laurie Pottmeyer 

Regarding the message in the team coming from an owner even though they didn’t remove them, is it related to the following updates?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-ie/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Microsoft%20Teams%2CRolling%20out&sear...

[#15]

Random owner or sometimes (Microsoft Team AadSync)is automatically deleting random user from the teams. what is going on

[#16]

Anyone knows how to disable this or why it happens that AadSync removes members?

[#17]

@_Przemek_ Well, as we can see from the "best response" it explains what was going on previously, that is until this was released https://www.microsoft.com/en-ie/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=64173

I suppose it is still work in progress because in my own org. it looks great in some Teams (all system messages etc. are displayed in the info pane only) but at the same time in other Teams the information is still populated under "Posts" and the info pane.

The one big difference in Posts tab though is that it is no longer a "random owner" selected but instead "Microsoft Teams AadSync" performing the change.

[#18]

@bec064OK thank you for your answer. The case concerns information shown on the general channel. I understand.
But why it happened that user AaDSync removed members from the team. I have to present if it is an MS error. Can you please link to the official position on this matter?

[#19]

@_Przemek_ Hi, I just did in the previous post. Please read the "Best response" in the conversation as it is a Microsoft representative that replied. And then click on the link I attached to see the associated roadmap item. The new "Microsoft Teams AadSync" is used/displayed instead of the random owner when performing background workflows from Groups to Teams.

You can read this as well https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/35515990-users-added-to-team-l...

[#20]

We have the same problem! We are disabling accounts when people are participating in a shared work program so they can't undertake work on the days they are not supposed to but removing from the Team and then being re-added to the Team causes issues. I've had reports of people not seeing posts made on the days they were out of the Team but days later they show up.