Microsoft Teams Free (classic) has been discontinued as of April 12th, 2023

Microsoft Teams Free (classic) has been discontinued as of April 12th, 2023, meaning that users who signed in with their personal Microsoft account will no longer be able to use the app. However, depending on how you use Teams, there are different options available to you.

SCENARIO 1: If you use Teams to chat or have meetings with friends and family, you can go to this page and scroll down, download the Teams for Home or Small business and continue to use the platform for free. Please know, the new Teams free app might be already installed on your computer. Go to your Windows start menu, type Teams, and see if you see the Teams logo showing white background with a purple T. If so, that's the one you can use. This will give you group calling for up to 60 minutes and up to 100 participants, as well as unlimited chat with your friends and family.

SCENARIO 2: However, if you need longer group calling duration or more participants, you may want to consider subscribing to one of the Microsoft 365 personal plans. This will give you access to other Office 365 apps and increase your group calling duration to 30 hours and your participants to 300. Please note, in this scenario, you are still using the new Teams free app and your personal Microsoft account. The only difference is you have longer group meeting duration and more participants.

SCENARIO 3: If you're a sole proprietor who uses your personal Microsoft account to conduct business with other organizations, you may face challenges if those organizations are using Microsoft Teams for business. You may receive error messages when trying to join a meeting with business clients. To address this, there are a few options available to you.

• Option 1: You can join the meeting via the web browser as an anonymous user, which will allow you to join without signing into an email address. However, you won't have access to all the features of the desktop app, such as using emoji, GIF and keeping chat history.
• Option 2: Alternatively, you can ask the meeting host to add your personal Microsoft account to their organization's Azure AD tenant as an external or guest user. This will enable you to download Microsoft Teams for business (scroll down and download the "Teams for Work or School") and sign in with your personal Microsoft account to join their meeting.
• Option 3: Finally, you may want to consider upgrading to a business license, such as the Microsoft Teams Essential license. This will require you to enter your company's domain, but Microsoft can provide a default domain for sole proprietors who usually don't have their own company domain.

?Article source: Microsoft Community 2023