Microsoft is pulling the plug on Together mode in Teams just before its sixth birthday. Starting June 30, 2026, the pandemic-era feature that placed colleagues in virtual theatres and cafes will vanish from the View menu. Microsoft says the move will sharpen video quality, simplify the meeting interface, and clear the runway for upgrades like super-resolution and noise removal that users have been asking for.
Why Microsoft Is Retiring Together Mode
The decision, posted on the Microsoft Tech Community blog, marks the end of an experiment born during the lockdown era. Together mode launched in July 2020 to fight “Brady Bunch” fatigue, dropping participants into shared AI-generated scenes so meetings felt less like a wall of webcams.
Six years later, Microsoft says the feature has become one option too many. The company already offers Gallery, Large Gallery, and dynamic views, and engineers want to stop spreading resources thin.
By consolidating layouts into Gallery, Microsoft can redirect server capacity into the foundational video improvements customers have been requesting for years.
“Focusing on Gallery lets us deliver higher and more stable video quality across meetings by concentrating on client-optimized rendering,” Microsoft explained in its announcement to IT admins.
What Changes on June 30
The shutdown is clean and complete. There will be no toggle hiding in settings, no legacy fallback for power users.
- Together mode disappears from the View menu in every Teams client.
- All built-in scenes, including the auditorium, coffee shop, and conference room, are gone.
- Custom scenes uploaded by enterprise admins through the Scenes Studio will stop working.
- Seat assignments set by organizers for recurring meetings will be erased.
- Branded backdrops for company town halls must now be rebuilt as standard backgrounds.
Microsoft is advising organizations that relied on custom Together mode scenes for branding to migrate those visuals into the regular background gallery before the deadline.
The Pandemic Feature That Outlived Its Moment
When Together mode arrived, it was a genuine novelty. Microsoft Research head Jaron Lanier pitched it as a way to ease the mental strain of staring at floating heads, citing studies that suggested shared visual context reduced video meeting exhaustion.
For a while it worked. Schools used it for virtual classrooms. Sports broadcasters even borrowed the tech, placing NBA fans inside arena seats during the 2020 bubble season.
But hybrid work changed the math. Most meetings today mix in-room participants with remote callers, and Together mode never adapted gracefully to that reality. Usage data, according to insiders familiar with Teams telemetry, has been falling steadily since 2023.
Quick Timeline
July 2020 Together mode launches during global lockdowns.
2021 Custom scenes and Scenes Studio added for enterprises.
2023 Gallery gets dynamic layout upgrades, overshadowing Together.
June 30, 2026 Together mode officially retired.
What Gallery Mode Offers Instead
Gallery is not the static grid it used to be. Microsoft has spent the past two years rebuilding it with dynamic framing, AI-based cropping, and smoother transitions when speakers change.
The company is now promising deeper investments. Three improvements are on the roadmap once Together mode is decommissioned:
| Upcoming Feature | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Super-resolution | Upscales low-bandwidth video streams so faces stay sharp on weak connections. |
| Denoising | Cleans grainy webcam footage in dim home offices and conference rooms. |
| Improved color accuracy | Corrects skin tones and lighting for more natural-looking meetings. |
Microsoft argues these upgrades matter more than novelty layouts. Stable, high-quality video has consistently topped the Teams feedback portal as the number one user request.
What Admins and Users Should Do Now
IT teams have just over six weeks to prepare. The transition is straightforward but requires action for organizations that built brand experiences around Together mode.
- Audit recurring meetings that use seat assignments and notify organizers the layout will reset.
- Export custom scenes as image files, then re-upload them as approved organizational backgrounds.
- Update training materials and internal wikis that reference the View menu’s Together option.
- Test Gallery and Large Gallery in town halls and all-hands meetings before the cutover.
For everyday users, the change should be barely noticeable. Gallery will simply become the default group view, with the same reactions, hand raises, and spotlight controls already familiar to most.
The reaction online has been mixed but mostly resigned. On LinkedIn and X, several enterprise IT managers welcomed the cleanup, calling Together mode a feature their employees stopped using around 2022. A smaller group of educators and HR leaders pushed back, saying the playful scenes helped break the ice during onboarding sessions and remote team-building events.
Microsoft has not indicated whether any element of Together mode, such as scene-based backgrounds, will return in a different form. For now, the company is firmly betting that fewer choices and better pixels will serve its 320 million Teams users better than virtual auditoriums ever did.
Together mode was a creative answer to a frightening time, a small attempt to make isolation feel a little less lonely. Its retirement closes a quiet chapter of how we worked through the pandemic, and reminds us how quickly our digital habits move on. Did you ever use Together mode at work or school? Share your memories and thoughts in the comments below, and tell us whether Microsoft is making the right call by chasing video quality over novelty.
