Teams status during meetings.

How Teams decides what your status is during a call

Teams has two different ways of figuring out whether you are in a meeting, and they produce very different results depending on which meeting tool you use.

Path one: Teams itself is the meeting host. When you join a Teams call — scheduled or ad-hoc, channel meeting or 1:1 — Teams knows. The presence service flips you to "In a meeting" (or "In a call," for 1:1) immediately, with the camera icon overlay on your dot. No input required. The status holds for as long as the call is live, whether you talk, listen, or sit silently on mute.

Path two: a third-party tool is the meeting host. When you join a Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, or any non-Microsoft meeting, Teams has no idea. Those tools do not send a "user joined a meeting" signal to Microsoft. Teams falls back to its standard rule: keyboard and mouse input. If you stop touching the machine, the 5-minute timer starts.

During Teams meetings

This is the well-behaved case. Whether you joined the call from your desktop, your phone, or the web client, Teams marks you as "In a meeting" the moment the call connects. Your status updates everywhere at once — colleagues see the camera-icon dot, anyone trying to chat you sees the status text underneath your name.

The status stays accurate even if you mute yourself, turn off your camera, or step away from the keyboard briefly. As long as the call is connected, the presence service treats you as actively in a meeting. When the call ends, Teams flips you back to whatever your previous state was (Available, Away, Busy).

During Zoom, Google Meet, and Webex

These are the frustrating cases. None of them tell Teams anything. From Teams' perspective, you are sitting in front of your computer doing nothing.

If you are actively typing in the Zoom chat, scrolling through Meet's side panel, or moving your mouse to advance Webex slides, you will stay Available — those count as input. If you are silently watching a colleague present for 10 minutes, Teams will flip you to Away long before the meeting ends. Your camera is on, your face is visible, but Teams does not look at the camera. It only looks at your keyboard.

This is by design. Microsoft is not deliberately ignoring competitor video tools — it just has no integration with them and no way to know what other applications are doing on your machine.

During screen sharing

If you share screen in a Teams call: Teams shows you as "Presenting" (the dot becomes red with a screen-share icon). Teams knows you are actively driving the meeting and marks you accordingly.

If you share screen in Zoom, Meet, or another tool: Teams has no idea screen sharing is happening. Whether the dot stays green depends entirely on whether you are clicking and typing while you present. Static slide decks with no input will let the timer fire.

The "In a meeting" status from your calendar

Teams does one more thing worth knowing: it reads your Outlook calendar. If your calendar shows an event scheduled at the current time, Teams will set your status to "In a meeting" even when you have not actually joined any call.

This is helpful most of the time — people see you have a meeting on your calendar and know not to expect an immediate reply. But it has two failure modes worth knowing:

• Stale calendar events. If your calendar has a recurring meeting you no longer attend, Teams will mark you "In a meeting" every time the event fires. Decline or remove it.
• Calendar-only events. Blocking out time for focus work with a "Focus" or "Heads down" event will also flip you to "In a meeting," which is sometimes desirable and sometimes not.

Mobile changes the picture

If you are signed into Teams on both desktop and mobile, Microsoft uses an aggregated presence: as long as any session reports active, you stay Available. Mobile counts as active when the Teams app is in the foreground.

This is why some people stay green during meetings even when desktop should have flipped them to Away — their phone has Teams open in the foreground, and that session is reporting active. The moment they switch apps or the screen sleeps, that signal drops.

Why this matters for back-to-back meetings

If your day is wall-to-wall non-Teams meetings — Zoom blocks for clients, Google Meet for cross-org work, Webex with vendors — you will spend most of your day showing as Away on Teams. Colleagues who try to message you during a Zoom call will see your yellow dot and assume you are unavailable, when in fact you are deeply engaged in an external call.

The cleanest fix is to bypass the inactivity logic entirely. Cloud presence services hold your Teams Available status independently of what your local machine is doing — your dot stays green through every Zoom, Meet, and screen share, no input required. Read the full guide to keeping Teams active automatically.