Microsoft explains how it made Teams so much faster in 2026

Microsoft reveals major 2026 Teams performance gains, cutting chat-switch latency and slashing freezes, with backend changes users rarely see.

Microsoft Teams is Redmond's flagship online communication and collaboration tool, primarily used in enterprise, government, and school environments. It regularly receives updates, with Microsoft frequently revealing features currently in development as well, such as Efficiency Mode and a dedicated app for meeting recaps. Now, the company has shed some light on the backend enhancements it has made to its popular software in 2026.

During the first half of 2026, switching between chats has become 20% faster on desktop and web, which is especially great for less powerful devices or hardware on weak networks. Microsoft explains that it tracks two types of chat switches. The first is a warm switch, which relates to returning to a recent chat, in which case it is most likely already present in memory and should load extremely fast. The other is a cold switch where a chat that hasn't been opened recently is now opened. Naturally, the second type of chat switch was causing the most notable latency spikes.

Microsoft realized that this was happening because of three reasons. First, the query to fetch conversation data was being fired too late. Next, queries were being sent sequentially, increasing the overall round-trip time. Finally, there was no handling of response priority, which meant that non-critical responses would sometimes block the main thread. Microsoft solved all of these problems by firing the data query immediately, bundling queries to be sent together so that they wouldn't create a "waterfall" effect, and enabling faster painting of the frame. As a result, warm and cold switches now have almost the same latency, and the only distinguishable difference between them is due to the data layer response time

Next, Microsoft focused on reducing app hangs and freezes on macOS and iOS by 35%. On macOS, the company has a health monitor thread running in the background that does exactly what it says on the tin. The tech firm built a dedicated StackDecoder tool to analyze health monitor's output at scale. Through this combination, it decided to move several error reporting and monitoring threads either to the background or treated them as an asynchronous call so that they wouldn't block the main thread, causing Teams to freeze.

On iOS, the same result was accomplished through optimization of computations, caching, offloading operations from the main thread, refactoring database access behaviors, deferring non-critical tasks, and more.

On a related note, it also made people search 25% on iOS by optimizing the query pipeline, and efficient database task queuing and scheduling.

However, Microsoft has emphasized that improving Teams' performance is an ongoing endeavor, and that it hopes that these efforts will continue to make the software a reliable partner in online communication scenarios. On a related note, Microsoft recently unveiled some upcoming performance upgrades for OneDrive on macOS too, and you can check those out here.

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Posted Thursday 11 June 2026 at 7:41 am AEST (my time).

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