Microsoft tosses Teams Live chat into its feature graveyard
Microsoft blocked new setups on August 6 and told users to remove the widget from their websites before retirement. Any remaining instances will be hidden afterward.Live chat was a relatively simple feature available with the Teams versions of Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard, and Premium. Companies embedded a chat widget on their websites, and messages from visitors were routed to a support team in Teams.
- ▪Microsoft blocked new setups on August 6 and told users to remove the widget from their websites before retirement.
- ▪Any remaining instances will be hidden afterward.Live chat was a relatively simple feature available with the Teams versions of Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard, and Premium.
- ▪Companies embedded a chat widget on their websites, and messages from visitors were routed to a support team in Teams.
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/applications/2026/08/07/microsoft-tosses-teams-live-chat-into-its-feature-graveyard/5284634 |
| Publication time | Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:39:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-07T12:40:42.643Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-07T12:40:42.643Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | HmnS3IB_31Qc · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); APPLICATIONS Microsoft tosses Teams Live chat into its feature graveyard Website support widget lasted 18 months before Redmond ended the conversation Richard Speed Richard Speed MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM REPORTER Published fri 7 Aug 2026 // 13:39 UTC Microsoft is killing Live chat in Teams about 18 months after launch as it seeks to "focus investments on newer customer engagement and communication experiences."The service will be retired on October 5, when customer messages will stop reaching…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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