Microsoft Has Broken Teams Connectors

Microsoft Teams has long had a feature they call a Connector. Connectors allow third parties, like Simple In/Out, to send messages into the Teams chat channel of your choice. Using Connectors, our customers can relay messages to Teams when users update their statuses.

Connectors are very convenient for organizations that live and die in Teams chat. Coupled with our industry-leading Automatic Status Updates, Connectors can be a powerful tool to keep users up-to-date.

Since January 4th, 2023, Microsoft has broken connectors in Teams.

We began receiving reports from Simple In/Out users that their Microsoft Teams Connectors were no longer working. Worse yet, administrators couldn’t add a new Connector. It’s now impossible for existing customers to replace the broken Connector, and new Simple In/Out trial users cannot test Connectors at all.

We’ve been working with Microsoft since the first report. We’ve filed bug reports, held video calls, and transmitted feedback. Microsoft acknowledges the issue but have no remedy or fix at this time.

To add insult to injury, Microsoft hasn’t publicly acknowledge they have broken Connectors. With no idea of when Connectors will be working again, we have been prodding Microsoft to inform their own customers. Microsoft has avenues for notification, such as their Office Service Health dashboard or the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account. Both show Teams issues, but this one remains conveniently absent.

When pressed on Tuesday, January 17th, we were promised Microsoft would make this public “very shortly.” After 24 hours of silence, we pressed Microsoft about their definition of “shortly” (which is clearly different from ours). Microsoft responded their “ETA seems Monday night.”

You read that right: Microsoft requires a week to publicize a bug they have been investigating for weeks. How long will a fix take if merely tweeting an advisory takes a week? We’re not optimistic.

As you can tell, I’m personally beyond-frustrated with Microsoft’s responses. We know it’s frustrating to our customers relying on Simple In/Out daily. On Microsoft’s behalf, we apologize that this feature stopped working. If you’d like to notified of Microsoft’s slow, glacial, lumbering progress fixing Connectors: reach out to us. We’ll do what they haven’t: keep you in the loop.