Microsoft is Increasing Teams Group Chat Size This Month

With more than 75 million people now using Teams every day, and nearly two dozen companies with more than 100,000 employees using the application, communication is at the heart of Teams. And up until this month, there has been a 100 person limit on group chats.

Microsoft is rolling out an update to Teams that will enable you to invite up to 250 people into a chat. The update is rolling out now with all tenants having access to this expanded to capacity by mid-May.

As with the previous 100 group limit, Microsoft does have a couple of controls in place to keep the chatrooms from becoming an explosion of notifications and distractions. Once a chat has more than 20 people in the room, the following features are turned off: Outlook automatic replies and Teams status messages; typing indicator; video and audio calling; sharing; and read receipts.

If for some reason you do not want to allow more than 100 people into a group chat, you are out of luck: at this time, Microsoft does not allow admins to limit room capacity. And as an additional note, this update does not impact max capacity for calls, which is currently 20, nor does it impact the maximum limits for file attachments.

For those that need this update, and the company says that this has been requested, this will be a welcomed update. While it’s not going to drastically improve Teams’ core functionality, for large companies who need large group chats, this should help make Teams a little bit easier to adopt.