The Microsoft Teams Together Mode retirement takes effect on 30 June 2026, removing the shared virtual scenes that defined pandemic-era video meetings. The View menu toggle, all scenes, custom scenes, and seat assignments go with it. Here is what is changing, why Microsoft is doing it, and what it means in practice.
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What Together Mode was
Microsoft introduced Together Mode in July 2020, at the height of the remote-work surge driven by the pandemic. The feature used AI segmentation to cut each participant out of their background and place them into a shared virtual scene — an auditorium, a coffee shop, a conference room. The effect was theatrical: instead of a grid of separate boxes, everyone appeared to occupy the same space.
At launch, Microsoft positioned it as a remedy for video call fatigue, arguing that the sense of shared presence made long meetings feel less draining than a standard grid layout. Teams itself was growing at extraordinary speed during this period, expanding from around 32 million to 145 million monthly active users between early 2020 and mid-2021. Together Mode arrived at exactly the moment when novelty and experimentation in collaboration software felt both necessary and welcome.
Over time, the feature expanded. Microsoft added more scenes, including classrooms and cafés, and introduced custom scene creation, allowing organisations to build branded virtual spaces for all-hands meetings, training sessions, and structured events. Seat assignment gave organisers control over where participants appeared within a scene — a useful capability for presentations and structured formats where visual order mattered.
Microsoft Teams Together Mode retirement: what goes on 30 June
Microsoft confirmed the retirement via message centre notification MC1296478 on 30 April 2026, with a public blog post from Teams product manager Katarina Tranker following on 14 May 2026. The retirement is comprehensive and permanent:
- The Together Mode toggle will be removed from the View menu in Teams meetings.
- All standard scenes will be retired.
- Custom scenes, including any built by organisations for branded events, will no longer be usable.
- Seat assignment functionality goes with the feature.
- There is no admin policy or tenant setting to keep Together Mode active after the retirement date.
Meetings recorded in Together Mode will remain accessible in their original form, but the layout cannot be replicated in real time once the feature is gone. Organisations that built recurring event workflows around custom scenes or seat assignments will need to adapt those formats before the deadline.
Microsoft’s stated reasons
Microsoft’s official rationale centres on simplification. Tranker’s announcement described the retirement as helping to simplify the meeting experience, reduce complexity behind the scenes, and focus engineering investment on improvements that benefit every Teams meeting — specifically video quality, stability, and performance.
The practical case is straightforward. Together Mode required AI segmentation of every participant’s video feed simultaneously, then compositing each feed into a shared scene in real time. That process is meaningfully more demanding on CPU and GPU resources than a standard gallery view, which can cause performance degradation on older hardware and in large meetings. Maintaining and extending a feature that carries that overhead — while usage had declined well below its 2020 peak — is harder to justify as the product matures.
The Gallery View that replaces it as the primary multi-participant layout can now display up to 49 participants and scales tile sizes automatically based on device capability. Microsoft’s position is that Gallery handles the original use case — seeing the people in your meeting — without the overhead of scene rendering or segmentation.
The broader pattern
Together Mode is not the first pandemic-era Microsoft collaboration experiment to be retired. Microsoft Mesh, the company’s 3D avatar and spatial meeting platform, was discontinued in December 2025. The arc is consistent: features that were built and promoted during a period of rapid experimentation in 2020 and 2021, when the case for anything that made video meetings feel more human was easy to make, are now being assessed against current usage data and current engineering priorities.
Those priorities have shifted clearly toward AI. Microsoft’s current investment in Teams is concentrated on Copilot integration — AI-generated meeting notes, intelligent recap experiences, follow-up automation, and agent-based workflows. The Together Mode architecture, with its GPU-intensive scene rendering and relatively small active user base, does not fit that direction. The engineering resource freed by retiring it is a meaningful contribution to work the product team considers more valuable.
This is worth noting beyond the specific feature. Microsoft 365 is a subscription product, and one characteristic of subscription products is that features arrive and depart on the vendor’s schedule. The Together Mode retirement is a clean example: a feature that was useful and genuinely popular in one period, that was not heavily used by the time of its removal, goes away — and tenants have no mechanism to keep it. That is how the model works.
What to do before 30 June
For most Teams users, no action is required. Routine meetings running in Gallery View will proceed exactly as before. The impact is narrow: organisations that built repeatable formats around custom scenes, branded spaces, or seat assignments have work to do.
A short checklist for affected tenants:
- Inventory custom Together Mode scenes before the end of June. Identify which recurring meetings or event templates rely on them.
- Notify event organisers and training leads who may have Together Mode baked into a standard presentation format without realising it.
- Update internal documentation and meeting guides that reference Together Mode as an available option.
- Evaluate branded backgrounds as a replacement for custom scene-based visual identity. Microsoft is pointing organisations toward these as the nearest equivalent for brand presence in meetings.
- Consider Spotlight for use cases where seat assignment was used to keep a specific presenter’s video prominent throughout a session.
None of these alternatives fully recreates the shared-scene effect of Together Mode. For organisations that used it primarily for social meetings, team-building events, or to add visual personality to internal gatherings, there is no direct replacement. Gallery View with a custom background is the practical substitute.
Questions people are asking
Together Mode retires on 30 June 2026. Microsoft is rolling it out in phases — Targeted Release and Public Preview tenants will see the feature removed before the general availability deadline. Microsoft’s guidance is to stop building any new meeting workflow around Together Mode immediately and treat it as unavailable from the end of June.
No. Microsoft has confirmed there is no admin policy or tenant-level setting that will preserve Together Mode after the retirement date. It is a hard removal — the option disappears from the View menu for all tenants regardless of configuration.
Existing recordings made in Together Mode will remain accessible. The layout as it appeared in the recording is preserved. What changes is the ability to use Together Mode in new live meetings — once retired, the option is gone from the meeting controls.
Alternatives and impact
Microsoft’s stated replacement is Gallery View, which displays up to 49 participants and scales tile sizes based on device capability. For organisations that used Together Mode for visual branding, branded backgrounds — including frosted glass options — are the recommended substitute for maintaining visual identity in meetings. For presentation use cases where seat assignment kept a specific speaker prominent, the Spotlight feature provides similar control over whose video is foregrounded.
No. The retirement is limited to the Together Mode layout, its scenes, and seat assignment. Calls, chat, standard gallery meetings, screen sharing, recording, and all other Teams functionality are unaffected. For the majority of Teams users who never used Together Mode regularly, the change will be invisible.
Microsoft’s stated reasons are simplification, reduced engineering complexity, and a reallocation of resource toward video quality, stability, and performance improvements. Together Mode required intensive real-time AI processing to segment and composite participant video feeds, which carried a performance cost — particularly on older hardware. Usage had declined significantly from its 2020 peak. The feature also sits outside Microsoft’s current engineering priorities, which are concentrated on Copilot integration and AI-assisted meeting experiences rather than virtual scene rendering.
Gary Walsh is the Head of Tech Support at Software Supplies, with more than 20 years in the IT industry. Fully Microsoft-certified and experienced across the full business software stack — from Windows and Office to cloud infrastructure and device management — Gary delivers practical, no-nonsense advice that helps users and businesses get the most from their technology.
