In March 2025, Microsoft launched a simple tool for small businesses running Microsoft 365: a chat widget for their website that dropped customer messages straight into a Teams channel, so a support team never had to leave the app they were already living in. Brenna Robinson, then General Manager for Microsoft 365 and Copilot in the small and medium business unit, introduced it with some enthusiasm on Microsoft’s own blog.
Today we’re excited to take that customer experience to a new level with the introduction of live chat in Microsoft Teams, a faster and more engaging way for you to connect with your customers.
That excitement didn’t last. According to Message Center notice MC1449174, published on 7 August, Microsoft is retiring the feature entirely by October, citing a need to “focus investments on newer customer engagement and communication experiences.”
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The Customer Connect Rebrand That Didn’t Survive a Quarter
In April 2026, Microsoft renamed Live Chat to Customer Connect and rolled it out globally, expanding language support to 26 languages and adding appointment booking directly from the widget. Microsoft said at the time that the rename carried no functional changes, just a name better aligned with how customers actually used it. The rollout completed by the end of May. Ten weeks later, Microsoft announced it was shutting the whole thing down.
New customers lost the ability to set up Live Chat, or Customer Connect, in early August. Existing deployments get until 5 October, when the service stops relaying customer messages from websites into Teams altogether, with the rollout expected to complete by mid-October. Historical chat data and existing Teams channels remain accessible. What won’t survive is any new conversation, escalation or interaction through the widget.
Organisations still using it need to remove the widget from their websites, notify internal teams who rely on it, and have a replacement live before support ends in October.
Microsoft’s Fourth Teams Retirement in Four Months
Live Chat’s retirement isn’t an isolated decision. Teams Live Events retired on 30 June, replaced by the newer “events experience.” Together Mode, the pandemic-era feature that placed meeting participants in a shared virtual scene, was retired the same day. Whiteboard is next, with the standalone app and legacy boards scheduled to disappear in September. Microsoft has now cut four Teams features inside four months, narrowing what counts as a permanent part of the product and consistently pointing the displaced usage toward Copilot.
For IT admins, the immediate task is practical: audit whether Live Chat or Customer Connect is still active anywhere in the organisation, and have Dynamics 365 or Copilot Studio evaluated before October. For the wider UC&C market, a feature Microsoft rebranded and expanded five months ago has disappeared within a quarter, because it didn’t sit on the AI roadmap.
