Microsoft has announced that it is retiring the Live chat feature built into Microsoft Teams, bringing an end to a relatively simple way for businesses to connect website visitors directly with their Teams users.
From 6 August 2026, new customers are no longer able to set up Microsoft Teams Live chat. Existing installations will continue working for a short period, but Microsoft has confirmed that support will end completely on 5 October 2026.
For businesses currently using the feature, that means some action will be required before October.
What is or was Microsoft Teams Live chat?
Teams Live chat was designed primarily with small and medium-sized businesses in mind.
It allowed a business to add a chat box to its website and have customer enquiries delivered directly into Microsoft Teams. Website visitors didn’t need a Teams account themselves. They could simply open the widget, enter their details and start a conversation.
Behind the scenes, Teams would create a customer request and allocate it to an available member of the organisation’s support team.
This gave smaller organisations a relatively straightforward way of adding live customer service to their website without introducing an entirely separate communications platform.
The feature was available to customers using Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard and Business Premium.
When is Teams Live chat closing?
Microsoft has set out that from 5 October 2026, the service will be considered retired.
After that date, Microsoft says existing chat widgets embedded on websites will be hidden and customers will no longer be able to start conversations through them. Messages from the widget will also stop being relayed into Teams.
Microsoft is therefore advising businesses to remove the Live chat code from their websites before 5 October.
What happens to existing customer information?
The retirement of Live chat does not automatically delete information that has already been created.
Microsoft says existing Teams channels and associated Microsoft Lists data will remain subject to the normal Microsoft 365 retention and lifecycle policies configured within the organisation.
However, businesses using Live chat should still review what information they currently hold and consider whether any customer data needs to be exported or retained elsewhere before moving to another platform.
Why is Microsoft removing it?
The retirement is interesting because Live chat solved a fairly common problem for smaller Microsoft 365 customers. Rather than asking employees to monitor another customer service application, enquiries could arrive directly inside Teams, where staff were already working.
Microsoft has increasingly been consolidating, replacing and repositioning functionality across Microsoft 365, particularly as Copilot and its wider Dynamics 365 customer service products develop.
What should businesses use instead?
Microsoft is recommending organisations with ongoing live chat requirements look at Dynamics 365 Contact Center or its Copilot Studio Contact Center AI solutions.
Those platforms can provide considerably more sophisticated customer service capabilities, but they may also represent a much larger solution than a small organisation originally wanted when choosing the simple Teams widget.
For many SMEs, it may therefore make sense to investigate third-party live chat platforms rather than automatically moving to Dynamics 365.
The right replacement will depend on how the existing system is being used. A business receiving a handful of website enquiries each week may only need a simple website chat tool, while an organisation operating a dedicated customer service team could benefit from ticketing, automation, AI responses, reporting and integrations with its CRM.
What should you do if you currently use Teams Live chat?
If the Live chat widget is installed on your website, the most important thing is not to leave it until October.
Businesses should identify where the widget has been installed, choose a replacement platform and test the new system before removing the existing Teams integration.
Microsoft specifically recommends removing the Live chat widget from websites before 5 October 2026. For websites where the widget was installed manually, this involves removing the relevant Live chat script from the site’s HTML.
It is also worth checking who currently receives customer conversations, whether any automated processes rely on Live chat and what historical information needs to be retained.
Replacing the technology is only one part of the process. Businesses also need to make sure customers still have an obvious way to contact them once the existing widget disappears.
For organisations already using Microsoft 365 extensively, the retirement may be frustrating. Teams Live chat offered a straightforward way to bring website conversations into a platform employees were already using every day.
With the service disappearing in October, businesses using it now have a relatively short window to decide what comes next.
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