External communication in Teams not working? A “restart” will help!
Krähe mit HutWho hasn't experienced it – a strange problem whose solution cannot be explained by logic. There's a reason for the saying: Reboot is good! Restarting the device often solves a problem faster than analyzing it and trying to find a solution. The following issue in Teams, which I have encountered several times, also falls into this category.
Initial situation
The issue occurs primarily in new Microsoft Cloud tenants, but can of course also arise in older tenants where Teams has not yet been used. External access is enabled by default in Teams. Nevertheless, it may happen that it does not work. When an internal user attempts to write to an external contact, depending on the situation
- the contact cannot be found after entering the Teams address.
- a message is displayed stating that the contact cannot be reached due to organizational policies.
- a message is displayed stating that the contact is using Skype for Business and communication is therefore not possible.
Issue analysis
All of these errors are misleading. There appears to be an error in the process for creating new clients. This causes external communication not to be enabled, even though the setting in the Admin Center indicates that it should be. Support does not know the cause of this problem, but can usually provide a solution. And this solution is reminiscent of the statement “have you tried restarting?” 😉
Solution
The solution is simple:
- Disable external access:
- Open the Teams Admin Center
- In the “Allow or block external domains” selection menu, select the “Block all external domains” option.
- Wait 60 minutes to be on the safe side (this gives the background processes enough time to implement the change).
- Re-enable external access according to previous configuration.
For the PowerShell enthusiasts:
# Check whether the module is installed and install it if not
if (!(Get-InstalledModule MicrosoftTeams -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)){Install-Module MicrosoftTeams -Scope CurrentUser}
# Connect to Teams
Connect-MicrosoftTeams
# Show current settings
Get-CsTenantFederationConfiguration
# Disable external access
Set-CsTenantFederationConfiguration -BlockAllSubdomains $True
# Wait 60 minutes (3600 seconds)
Start-Sleep 3600
# Allow all domains again - if individual settings were set, reset them according to the output
Set-CsTenantFederationConfiguration -AllowedDomains AllowAllKnownDomains
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