MS Teams crashes *sometimes* during Video calls/meetings

StevenC365 Not that we've been able to identify so far.  There are about 15 different model Dell laptops with a variety of drivers out there. Issue has affected both Windows 7 and Windows 10 on those laptops.  Typically only two types of headsets are used, though the issue has affected users that don't use headsets as well. We generally have only one model of webcam deployed, and again the issue has affected users not using an external webcam as well. We use two styles of docking hardware and a variety of dock models and firmware, and the issue has affected users that are not docked at the time of the issue. I've also seen this issue affect users with different versions of MS Teams.

Users with half a dozen teams calls/meetings with video daily (like yourself) will not have any issues for a week or two, and then the one day they have issues the circumstances aren't out-of-the-ordinary compared to the other numerous calls they had with no problems. This is probably the most challenging part of troubleshooting this.

As you might imagine, the diverse landscape is making it challenging to identify a common thread between users with the issue. We are continuously engaging users to ask about the circumstances of the crashes to try to identify any sort of pattern: are they docked, what dock are they using, what devices were they using (model headset, webcam, any Bluetooth or wireless devices), what was network speed & latency at the time, was VPN connected, what OS version are they using, what model laptop, what graphics, wifi and ethernet drivers do they have, what Teams version do they have, do they reboot their computer regularly, what other applications were open at the time of the crash. If you can think of any other data we should be gathering to aide in this investigation to narrow down a common cause, please do share! 

Dennis1712Can you clear your log and then once the issue does this again post your logs here? I had zero luck with Microsoft Support on this issue where they just kept doing rudimentary things under three separate tickets that didn't even correlate to the issue. My key issue that i can duplicate on some systems running 1903 and 1909 is that you make one good call / conference and then hang up, perform a second call afterwards it crashes the TEAMS app and also causes the audio/video drivers to become temporarily locked for a short duration of time. TEAMS restarts but remains unstable until computer reboot. What about you?

TIER4TSNo, not at all. For a time I had one affected employee experiencing the crash so consistently I engaged with Microsoft regularly on the issue and it never escalated out of tier 1 support. It was a struggle to even convince them there was an issue needing investigation even after displaying the crash repeatedly with the support tech - It just never escalated and I kept repeating the same demonstrations and log gathering. It was a huge waste of time.

I strongly suspect Microsoft is just not supporting/developing to account for some hardware. My most interesting data point was connecting with another enterprise through an employee's spouse, whose company NEVER experienced any Teams crashing org-wide. The employee and their spouse worked from the same network (at home), had the same version of Teams, and had high volume of Teams calls every day - my employee's Teams crashed all the time, their spouse's did not. After connecting with that company's IT department I found out the only notable difference from their org and mine is they have a more modern and higher-end laptop fleet (we both use W10 and Dell laptops) So, throwing money at the problem to upgrade laptops would be one fix... obviously that's not really a solution for those of us with tighter budgets / slower replacement schedules.

Completely unrelated to Teams crashing problems, we've noticed that Microsoft isn't developing some Teams features for older hardware. Most recently we discovered the new "background effects" feature requires the AVX2 video extensions, which were introduced in Haswell processors (model is 4000 series). This means Dell Latitude 6330 and earlier laptops don't support it. 

Forrest_H The only machines experiencing crashes for us are the new Dell AIOs we purchased, all our other machines work fine. The AIOs do not have any sort of dock attached to them and we have found that on some removing the Realtek drivers from programs and features fixes the issue. On others it has no affect.

I am having the same issue , bizarrely only on Microsoft Surface Pro' 4 and 7's The rest of our estate is Dell and we dont have a problem.

I hope there is a fix as we are trying to promote teams and out high end users who use teams with Surface pros are finding it unworkable 

Lorenz_MichelsDo you have REALTEK drivers installed and what is the make/model of your computer specifically. Thank you.

Lorenz_Michels Hi, I finally found the SOLUTION to my specific problem. I turned of the onboard graphics card (Intel) via the BIOS and now all works fine!! So it wasn't a problem of MS Teams, neither the microphone nor the webcam. Since I use the NVIDIA graphics card to lighten up my three monitors and beamer, the onboard graphics card wasn't used. Apparently it still tried to interfere causing problems.