Random messages in Teams chat

Copper Contributor

Hello- just recently a few people have received random messages within one particular Team Chat; the original chat/meeting was on 9/29 but the last few weeks, we will receive a message from a person that has just random letters. Is this a hack? 

You will see for Dave Pruden: bunch of letters
Kristin - !
Kevin V- bunch of random letters

 

What could this be?

Lisa

9 Replies

@lisalis1972 

 

Is Dave sure his password isn't Goldmine8 ? It looks a lot like people have perhaps inadvertently typed something into the chat. 

That's what I was thinking- but a few people said they didn't type it.

@lisalis1972 We are starting to see this too. But with a "%" sign. Person says they were not typing in the meeting chat, but there are multiple posts that are showing just that character. Has there been any updates from people this? 

Hello, did you find out what might be causing this?
We have not been able to pinpoint the issue. We have a case opened with Microsoft and are still working on it. We were told to try changing the setting in Teams for 'Open application in background' (enable it) to see if that helped. Did that and it seemed it may have helped some, but the problem still happens intermittently. We use another application for logging in and it seems that focus gets lost from that application when Teams is opening and it intercepts what you were typing. Our last suggestion from Microsoft was to uninstall/reinstall Microsoft Teams, but that is a bit harder to have a user do.
We are seeing this in our company as well. We see random posts to a meeting chat from back in December 2020.
The obvious answer is that users are accidentally typing into this conversation without realizing it. However, as we talk to them, they really don't know how it happened and it seems more and more likely that there is something wrong with Teams itself that is causing this to happen.
I would love to know how and why this is happening, but I doubt we will ever really know.
At least organizers now have the option to disable chat once a meeting has concluded, which should reduce this weirdness going forward.
At first we thought it may just be meeting chats, but now that is not the case. It is chats, in general. If you can open a case with Microsoft, that would be great as we were told that this is not happening to anyone else. For us, this is now a security risk.
I think you are on to something when you talk about focus switching from another application to Teams, when Teams is opening.
I have noticed that Teams takes a long time to auto-start if you have that feature enabled. It seems plausible that someone could be in the middle of typing into any other application when Teams finally starts up and then it inadvertently takes focus without a person noticing it.
I would test disabling the auto-start feature of Teams to see if that helps with the issue.

@Tina A Garavaglia the same thing happened to me this morning. I did a screen lock and went on a morning tea break. When I got back it looked like I had typed OMG! in our Team chat.  I don't type in capitals, and very rarely use the exclamation mark. There is no explanation for it. So random.