Teams Meetings and Group Chat Limit Increased

Posted on by Tony Redmond

Limit was 100 then 250 then 350, then 300, and 250

Updated September 6, 2022

The Microsoft Teams service is experiencing heavy demand at present with the number of active users growing strongly. Microsoft has had to adjust some features to ensure that service levels are maintained, but they’re also using some of the saved resources to allow higher limits to some features. One such example is the increase in the participant limit for group chats, which was previously lifted earlier this month from 100 to 250. The previous 100 limit lasted a year before it was increased.

On May 27, Microsoft bumped the limit for Teams meetings (including meeting chats) to 350, but said that this was only on a temporary basis. At the time, Microsoft said that they would assess the effect of the new limit over time and decide in September if the increase should remain. One week later (June 2), Microsoft announced a reduction of the limit to 300 in an update to Office 365 notification MC214350. On the upside, the temporary nature of the increase appears to be lifted as there’s no mention about assessing the new limit in September. The current limit for participants in a group chat as of September 2022 is 250.

This Teams meeting has gone past the 250 participant limit
Figure 1: This Teams meeting has gone past the 250 participant limit

According to MC214350. Microsoft has started to roll out the new limit with the goal of having it effective worldwide by the end of June. No doubt the new limit will be popular with the large enterprises who have deployed Teams, including Microsoft’s own deployment where many online meetings hit the limit and stop others being able to join.

The Downside of Large Chats

Microsoft has plenty of experience running large-scale meetings. Teams Live Events currently cater for up to 20,000 attendees (again a temporary bump from the 10,000 norm), so increasing the limit for meeting attendees to 350 shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

Large group chats are different. Teams already limits some of the functionality available in group chats once the number of participants passes 20:

  • Outlook out-of-office replies and Teams status messages are not displayed for participants.
  • The indicator showing that someone is typing a message is disabled.
  • Video and audio calls can’t be started in the chat (but you can schedule a Teams meeting and send everyone a link to allow them to attend).
  • Sharing of documents (using OneDrive for Business) isn’t allowed.
  • Read receipts for messages don’t work.

These features are restricted to reduce the strain on the service. Fetching out-of-office information for many participants requires a lot of interaction with Exchange Online mailboxes while tracking who’s read a message for the same number consumes many processing cycles.

Lots of Duplicate Compliance Records Captured

The need to capture compliance records for conversations imposes another demand. When someone posts to a group chat, the Microsoft 365 substrate captures a compliance record of the message and copies it to the mailbox of each participant, including guest and hybrid users (special cloud-only mailboxes are used for this purpose). With 250 participants in a group chat, that’s 250 copies of the same message. With 300, it’s 300, and so on.

The Office 365 infrastructure has lots of server resources available to do this work and store the messages, but it is wasteful. Group chats don’t have a mailbox, so they aren’t able to store a single compliance record for messages in the same way that’s possible for channel conversations. From a compliance perspective, it’s good that the messages are captured, but if you investigate a problem, the potential number of duplicate items that a content search or eDiscovery case might uncover is now much larger.

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25 Replies to “Teams Meetings and Group Chat Limit Increased”

  1. Hi,

    I’m nowhere near that line… Meeting with 20 people maximum. Thank you for this information, it’s still interesting and good to know.

    Have a good week-end
    Regards
    Florian

    Reply
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  6. What happens if we go over the 300 limit? Doe the user get a message saying indicating they reached capacity?

    Reply

      1. Can you join the meeting if there are 250 people and one person leaves?

      2. Given that the limit is now 300, yes. But I think the question is can you join a meeting that is at the participant limit if someone leaves, and the answer is yes.

  7. Hi Tony – i have seen some conflicting messages and could really use your help. I work for a large organization and we all use Teams. I have a meeting coming up that requires around 320 participants. Will it allow me to execute? I prefer not to go to LIVE Event as i would like certain people to be able to show there screen at times. Hoping it will allow my this one time only…

    Reply

    1. This is what the Teams Advanced Communications license is supposed to solve by allowing people to organize meetings with up to 1,000 participants. If you don’t have this license, you’re restricted to 300 active participants. Once this number have joined the meeting, other (latecomers) won’t be able to join.

      Reply

  8. Ok, so if I get that add-on, will I be good for over 300 right away? Thank you for your support.

    Reply

  9. Ok. So if I get the add-on, ill be able to host a meeting with more than 300 participants right away?

    Reply

    1. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Do you have a Microsoft sales person? If so, I would confirm this with him/her.

      Reply

  10. when i export teams chats using security and compliance where are group chats identified and how are they identified.

    Reply

    1. You’ll have to do searches by specific teams if you want to be that certain. Microsoft used to include the team and channel in the message subject for compliance records to make it possible to identify the items belonging to a certain team, but they stopped doing this towards the end of 2018.

      Reply

  11. Hi I want to create a team meeting link for 300 members , how to i do it ? should i go to teams , click calender , new meeting and add all the 300 one by one ? or can i send to single person and if he shares to other 290 will it work out ?

    Reply

    1. If all the people are members of the same team, schedule the meeting in a channel and everyone can join there. If you want to create a private meeting, you can send it to a distribution list. Or create a meeting and post the link somewhere that people can copy it from. There are lots of articles on how to invite people to Teams meetings in this site.

      Reply

  12. Hello! When downloading the attendee list of a large meeting (160+), it doesnt seem to let me. Is there a max amount of attendees we are allowed to download?

    Reply

  13. is it again changd,,,, now only 100 people can be assigned in the education facaulty, we have moe than 100 students and teacherrs in total ,

    Reply

  14. Older post but relevant still today. We are talking about two different things here: 1. Attendee limits for a meeting and 2. Limits in a Teams’ chat. Correct? I am interested in #2.

    To my understanding and Microsoft documentation, the limit for a chat is 250 (not 300?). We have an all company chat for announcements, alerts, urgent information, etc. As our company grows, we are quickly approaching the 250 limit. Is there any way for us to increase this limit? Even if it’s a purchase of a license, etc. Any plans for Microsoft to increase this limit? Most of the competing applications have already increased their limit and it is hard to encourage Teams’ adoption when they seem to be behind others.

    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=62354

    Reply

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