Microsoft Teams: Send messages to attendees in the meeting lobby with Lobby chat

Updated September 3, 2025: We have updated the timeline. Thank you for your patience.

Coming soon for Microsoft Teams: Meeting organizers will be able to send one-way messages to attendees in the meeting lobby using the Lobby chat. The Lobby chat is intended to optimize the lobby experience for all participants, ensuring that organizers are better equipped to run external meetings and external attendees are well informed about the meeting when it begins. This feature is on by default and admins can choose to disable it in the Teams admin center (TAC).

This message applies to Teams on Desktop, Mac, Web

iOS and Android will be released shortly

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 480716.

When this will happen:

Targeted Release: We will begin rolling out mid-June 2025 and expect to complete by late June 2025.

General Availability (Worldwide, GCC, GCC High, DoD): We will begin rolling out late June 2025 and expect to complete by late September 2025.

How this will affect your organization:

Admin controls: After this rollout, the policy for Lobby chat will be on by default in the TAC. Admins can enable or disable Lobby chat with a meeting policy in the TAC. Under Meeting policies > Global (Org-wide default) > Meeting engagement, admins will find a new toggle option for Organizers can chat with lobby participant. When the option is enabled, participants who can't bypass the lobby due to meeting policy will be able to view messages sent by the organizer in a Lobby chat. To enable this policy, Meeting chat in the TAC must be set to On for everyone or On for everyone but anonymous users.

Meeting organizer experience: When someone joins the lobby, the meeting organizer will see a new Lobby tab in their Chat experience. The meeting organizer will be able to send one-way messages to attendees in the lobby in the Lobby tab:

Lobby attendee experience: When the meeting organizer sends a message to the lobby, a new Lobby chat panel will open in the right panel of the pre-join screen and display the message. Lobby attendees cannot reply to these messages: 

What you need to do to prepare:

This rollout will happen automatically by the specified dates with no admin action required before the rollout. You may want to notify your users about this change and update any relevant documentation.

For tenants where Meeting chat in the TAC is set to On for everyone or On for everyone but anonymous users, admins should assess the impact of the Lobby chat feature and update meeting policy settings as needed to suit their organization's requirements.