Microsoft Teams issues for external users and guests

Microsoft Teams is designed primarily for internal collaboration within an organisation. When external users or guests are invited to meetings, chats, or channels, they often experience missing features or restricted access that internal users do not.

These differences are not faults or misconfigurations in most cases. They are the result of how Microsoft Teams separates internal users from guests to protect organisational data, manage permissions, and meet compliance requirements.

This guide explains the most common Microsoft Teams issues experienced by external users and guests, why they occur, and what can realistically be done about them.

External users and guests commonly report issues such as:

• • Being unable to access meeting recordings after a meeting ends
  • Not seeing meeting recaps, transcripts, or attendance reports
  • Losing access to shared files after a meeting
  • Seeing different content compared to internal users
  • Experiencing inconsistent behaviour between browser and desktop versions

These issues can be confusing, particularly when external participants attended the same meeting as internal users and appeared to have access at the time.

Meeting recordings are one of the most common sources of confusion.

In Microsoft Teams:

• • Recordings of standard meetings are stored in the organiser’s OneDrive
  • Recordings of channel meetings are stored in the associated SharePoint site
  • Access to recordings is controlled by file permissions, not meeting attendance

As a result:

• • Guests can attend a meeting but still be unable to access the recording afterwards
  • Guests may see a recording link but receive an access denied message
  • Meeting recap features may only be visible to internal users

Guests do not automatically gain permission to the organiser’s OneDrive or SharePoint storage.

If a recording needs to be shared with a guest, the file must be explicitly shared with them, or access must be adjusted by the organiser or an administrator.

Some guests notice that they can see content during a live meeting but not afterwards.

This happens because:

• • Live meetings allow temporary, session based access

  • After a meeting ends, access falls back to underlying file permissions

  • Guests lose visibility once the session ends unless access is explicitly granted

This explains why recordings, recaps, or files appear to disappear after the meeting.

External users may also experience different behaviour depending on how they access Teams.

For example:

• • Browser based access may be more restricted

  • Desktop apps may cache permissions differently

  • Users signed into multiple tenants can be switched into the wrong context

Ensuring the correct account and tenant are selected is essential, particularly for external collaborators who work with multiple organisations.

There is an important distinction between:

• • Guest users, who are invited into an organisation’s tenant with limited rights

  • Members, who are added as full users and typically require licensing

Even when a guest is made a co organiser or presenter, they may still lack access to certain features unless they are converted into a full member account.

This distinction often explains why permissions cannot be resolved through meeting settings alone.

When to seek help

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