From Breakthroughs to Everyday Impact: Advanced Performance, Reliability, & User Experience in Teams
Written by: Jeff Chen, Catalin Ionut Fratila, Andrei Vieru, Ashish Rathore, Avinash Prasad, David Rosenthal, Fred Wu, David Zhao, Will Dixon and Kerry Perez Heffernan. At Microsoft, we know that speed and reliability are essential for Teams users—especially when you’re in the middle of an important meeting or collaborating with your team. When we rebuilt Teams in 2023, it marked a major leap forward in performance improvements, reflecting our deep commitment to listening to user needs and transforming feedback into tangible results. Our journey hasn’t stopped there. Every year, we push the boundaries of what Teams can do—introducing new performance enhancements, streamlined experiences, and thoughtful features. Since the redesigned chat and channels experience in 2024, we’ve built on that momentum with even more innovations in 2025. This blog outlines what we’ve achieved together this year. Always Fast & Responsiveness—Making Every Interaction Fluid Teams should feel fast and responsive, no matter your device or network. Thanks to your feedback and our engineering investments, we’ve made improvements across core Teams user interactions, including faster video loading time, faster application, launch time and faster switching to chat and channels across all Teams clients including Windows, Mac, and Mobile at 95 th percentile. Tracking performance metrics at the 95 th percentile signals if improvements apply to most users, including those with low-end devices and poor network conditions. In addition, we’ve systematically reduced layout shifts, flickers, and multi-pass rendering, using telemetry-driven prioritization to deliver a smoother, more delightful user experience. We’ve also evolved how Teams tracks the percentage of sessions that are fully responsive, that has resulted in major reductions in UI freezes and long delays. Together, these changes helps Teams feel more consistently fast and reliable for everyone. Reliability & Feedback—Listening and Improving Together While we’re proud of the progress so far, we know there’s always more to do. Your feedback keeps us grounded and focused on what matters: making Teams faster, more stable, and more enjoyable for you. Delivering a reliable experience at the scale of Microsoft Teams requires more than just monitoring technical metrics—it demands a deep understanding of real-world customer feedback and the ability to act on it quickly and intelligently. We turn feedback from every channel - whether it’s direct customer feedback, in-app reports, surveys, admin logs, or social media - into actionable insights, combining it with our reliability data to prioritize improvements that matter most. This ongoing validation ensures our metrics reflect real-world experiences and drive meaningful performance gains. Efficiency & Memory Management—Powerful Features, Light Footprint We understand that not all Teams issues are created equal. For some, a driver update on a laptop might trigger unexpected audio or video problems. For others, memory usage is a daily concern. We’re committed to working through these device-specific challenges, so Teams works reliably for everyone, everywhere on any devices. Delivering new features shouldn’t come at the cost of efficiency. That’s why our approach ensures Teams remains lightweight and resource-friendly. Over the past years, we have made improvements in following areas. Memory continues to be our top priority. With the improvements that we brought to new team for half memory consumption compared to classic Teams, we have deepened our partnership with Wv2 team and further reduced additional half of windows idle memory (now at 30% comparing to classic teams). Let’s unpack the details that make this possible Behind the Scenes – Delivering Performant Client at Scale Building a world-class collaboration platform like Microsoft Teams requires more than just feature innovation—it demands a disciplined approach to architecture, diagnostics, and customer partnership. Architecture Native Video Rendering: Fully embracing the hybrid desktop client architecture across web stack and native media technology, we have fundamentally rebuilt the API surface across web and native layers to simplify the video rendering in Teams meetings – this led to reduction of API calls over IPC by 40x when loading the meeting stage with 7x7 videos – resulting in 10% reduction in video loading time at 95 th percentile. Furthermore, the new simplified design significantly improved the video reliability and quality – with up to 36% reduction of video freezes and rendering failures. WebView2 Integration: Using WebView2 delivers a consistent rendering pipeline across Mac and Windows, accelerating feature rollout and enabling custom instrumentation for hard-to-debug edge cases. In addition, Teams performance is also greatly benefit from different integrations with Wv2 APIs. For example, the recent integration with IDBIndex: getAllRecords() method for faster chat and channel switch by 10%, and Set MemoryUsageTargetLevel, Empty Working Set for Windows Idle memory by 40% improvements Data Fetching: Granular cache partitioning contributed to chat switching speed improvements by 10%, with preloading and background prefetching in testing for further gains. This builds on work we shared in an earlier post macOS Optimizations: We’ve invested in making our macOS application feel just as fast and native as a fully native app. To achieve this, we not only take advantage of several macOS-specific optimizations (i.e. populate the dyld caches after installation, run gktool post launch). These leads to 50% application launch time improvements that are specific to Mac. Mobile meeting battery consumption: As part of our targeted performance improvements for meetings, we optimized background processing, improved resource reuse through smarter caching, reduced millions of allocations, and delivered an efficient experience for our mobile users. Diagnostics Operating at global scale requires proactive detection and rapid remediation. Root causing unresponsiveness issues at scale: We know that freezes or hangs can be tough to diagnose, so we've improved how we collect and analyze data across platforms. By enhancing instrumentation in WebView2 and using better telemetry—like capturing native process data—we can more easily spot patterns and fix desktop or native issues. We also use efficient event tracing (ETW) to gather targeted insights, helping us quickly identify, fix, and prevent problems before they impact users. Advanced Telemetry & Leak Detector Service: Automated anomaly detection and real-time diagnostics continuously monitor memory leaks, grouping similar issues and prioritizing fixes. This approach reduced major leak rates to less than 1%, improving stability across millions of users. Customer Partnership We co-design with enterprise customers to validate improvements in real-world environments and align engineering priorities with business needs. This collaboration ensures Teams delivers measurable value—speed, reliability, and efficiency—where it matters most. We have kept in mind customer bandwidth consumption during updates and have implemented smarter mechanisms such as Delivery Optimization (P2P downloads) and a Distributed Update schedule. An important aspect of all this extensive work and new functionality is for customers to make sure they are updating to the latest version of the Teams client This not only ensures they are getting the latest security updates and improvements but also is how we deliver all these significant performance enhancements. We have recently released the Teams Client Health dashboard in Teams Admin Center to help customers ensure their users are always on the latest versions. Looking Forward Our journey doesn’t stop here. We’re pushing for even higher responsiveness, further memory reductions, and greater efficiency for 2026. We’ll continue to invest in platform, framework, and telemetry innovations to sustain and extend Teams’ performance leadership. Thank you for sharing your stories, frustrations, and suggestions. Every customer interaction, post, and survey response helps us build a better Teams. We’re on this journey together, and your experience is at the heart of every improvement we make.
