Microsoft is switching off Teams Live chat on 5 October – take the widget off your website

Microsoft has confirmed it is retiring Teams Live chat, the widget that Microsoft 365 Business customers could add to their website so visitor enquiries landed straight in Teams. Microsoft’s own guidance, updated on 6 August, sets two dates: new setups were blocked that same day, and on 5 October 2026 the service stops working.

After that date, anything a visitor types into the widget no longer reaches Teams. Widgets left on a website hide themselves, and new conversations, escalations and appointment bookings all stop. Existing records are not deleted – the Teams channels and stored customer details stay, subject to whatever retention policy already applies in your tenant.

The feature only launched in March 2025, giving it around eighteen months. The Register reports that Microsoft wants to concentrate on newer customer engagement products, and is pointing businesses towards Dynamics 365 Contact Center or Copilot Studio instead.

Who this affects

You are in scope if you are on Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard or Premium and somebody set Live chat up and put the widget on your site. Those three plans were the only ones that ever included it. If you are on an Enterprise plan, or you never switched it on, there is nothing here for you to do.

It is worth a look even if you think you do not use it. Setup ran through the Admin app in Teams and needed a global admin, and Microsoft’s instructions covered plain HTML, WordPress, Wix and Squarespace – so the code may be sitting on a site somebody else built for you. The businesses most likely to be caught are the ones that switched it on, saw a trickle of enquiries and forgot about it. Come October those enquiries simply stop arriving, and nothing warns you.

What to do before 5 October

• Find out whether you have it. In Teams, open the Admin app and look for Live chat in the left-hand menu. Or search your website’s page source for a <script> tag with id="chatbot".
• Take the widget off the site. Microsoft’s instruction is to remove that <script> tag from every page it appears on. Leaving it will not break anything, but tidying it up properly beats relying on it to hide itself.
• Export anything you need to keep. Past conversations stay in the Teams channel and its associated list, governed by your normal retention settings rather than kept indefinitely. If those chats are sales enquiries or customer records, get them out now.
• Tell whoever answered the chats. Up to 25 people could be on the handoff team. They will otherwise sit waiting for requests that are never coming.
• Decide what replaces it, if anything. Microsoft suggests Dynamics 365 Contact Center or Copilot Studio, both of which cost more than the nothing you were paying. A good contact form, a click-to-call link or an independent chat tool may suit a small team better. Price all three before defaulting to the Microsoft option.

If you would rather we handled it

This is a ten-minute job for most businesses, and a frustrating one to discover in November, when you work out why the enquiries stopped. If you are not sure whether the widget is on your site, or you want it taken off and something sensible put in its place before the deadline, that sits between our Office 365 support and website maintenance. Ask us and you will hear back in about 15 minutes on average – well inside the deadline.

Call us on 01202 237 273 or book a call.