The Complete Guide to Microsoft Teams Status Icons
Microsoft Teams has more presence indicators than most chat tools. Where Slack uses essentially two states (Active and Away), Teams uses up to eight, mixing automatic and manual states, with subtle differences that affect how your colleagues read your availability. Understanding the difference between "Away" and "Appear Away" — or "Busy" and "Do Not Disturb" — can change how you're perceived without you doing anything different.
This guide explains every Teams presence indicator, what triggers it, what others see, and which you can actually control.
Available (green check)
The default "I'm here and reachable" state. Set automatically when Teams detects you're active — using your keyboard or mouse, in a Teams call, or with the Teams window focused. Also settable manually, but Teams will override your manual setting if it detects you've been inactive for ~5 minutes.
What others see: green circle with a white checkmark next to your name. The strongest "ping me anytime" signal you can send.
Busy (red square)
Set automatically when you're in a meeting on your calendar, on a Teams call, or sharing your screen. You can also set it manually if you want to discourage interruptions but still get notifications.
What others see: red square next to your name. The convention is "you'll get a reply eventually, but maybe not right now."
Do Not Disturb (red minus)
Stronger than Busy. Suppresses most notifications and chat pings. Only set manually — Teams will never automatically put you in DnD. Often used during focused work, presentations, or when sharing your screen.
What others see: red circle with a horizontal white bar. People generally treat this as "do not interrupt unless urgent."
Be Right Back (yellow clock)
A manual state. Indicates a short, voluntary absence — coffee, bathroom, quick errand. Distinct from Away because it implies intentionality: you know you're stepping out and you'll be back shortly.
What others see: yellow clock icon. Practically identical to Away in appearance, but the intent signal differs.
Away (yellow clock)
Set automatically when Teams detects no mouse or keyboard activity for ~5 minutes. This is the state most people are trying to avoid when they look for tools to keep Teams active.
What others see: yellow clock icon. The visual is identical to "Be Right Back" and "Appear Away" — others can't distinguish between voluntary and automatic.
Appear Away (yellow clock)
A manual state where you deliberately want to look unavailable while still being able to see messages. Useful for focused work where you don't want to be pinged but still want to monitor what's coming in.
What others see: the same yellow clock as Away. There's no visual indicator that distinguishes Appear Away from automatic Away — that's intentional, since the point of Appear Away is to look like normal Away.
Offline (empty circle)
Set automatically when you've signed out of Teams or you haven't been active on any Teams client for an extended period (typically 30+ minutes after Away). On mobile, you'll appear Offline almost immediately after closing the app.
What others see: empty grey circle next to your name. Strongest "I'm not reachable right now" signal short of being entirely absent from the directory.
Out of Office (purple)
Set automatically when you have an Outlook out-of-office auto-reply enabled. Teams pulls this from your Microsoft 365 calendar. Returns to your normal status when the out-of-office period ends.
What others see: purple circle with a person icon. Pairs with the out-of-office message Outlook auto-replies with when someone emails you.
Custom Status Message vs Presence Indicator
Teams has two distinct concepts that are easy to confuse: the presence indicator (the coloured dot) and the status message (a free-text label).
The presence indicator is one of the icons above. The status message is a string you can set, like "Working from home" or "In meeting until 3pm" or just a short note. Status messages appear when someone hovers your name or before they send you a message. The two are independent — you can be Available with a status message of "Heads down, please email," or you can be Do Not Disturb with no status message at all.
Most people use them poorly. Status message is the right tool when you want to communicate something specific. The presence indicator is what colleagues actually glance at in their chat list.
How Teams Determines Available vs Away
Teams' presence service is shared across multiple Microsoft surfaces — Outlook, SharePoint, Microsoft 365 Groups. Your activity signals come from whichever client you're using: the Teams desktop app, the Teams web client at teams.microsoft.com, or any of the integrated Office apps.
On the desktop app, Teams tracks system-wide mouse and keyboard input. As long as your computer is in use, your status stays Available. The moment system input stops for the threshold duration (~5 minutes), the client signals "inactive" to Microsoft's presence service and you switch to Away.
On the web client, Teams tracks browser-window focus and within-tab activity. The same threshold applies, but the tab needs to be in focus periodically — a Teams tab open in the background but never clicked will still flip you to Away.
If you have multiple Teams clients open (desktop on your laptop, web on another machine, mobile on your phone), Teams uses the most-active one. As long as any client is signalling activity, you're Available across all of them.
Can You Manually Control Your Presence Indicator?
You can manually set Busy, Do Not Disturb, Be Right Back, Appear Away, or Available. You cannot, however, hold yourself in Available indefinitely. Teams treats manual Available as a preference — if your activity signals indicate you're not actually using a Teams client, the service will eventually revert you to Away regardless of what you set.
This is the fundamental limitation of trying to "stay green on Teams" through manual controls alone. The manual selection is honored briefly, but Microsoft's presence service ultimately trusts client-side activity signals over user preference. To stay Available indefinitely, you need an active client signalling activity — which is exactly what Stay Green On Teams provides from the cloud.
What Others See — Chat, Mentions, and Channel Lists
Your presence indicator appears in three primary places others see you:
- In direct chats: a small coloured dot on your avatar in the chat header and chat list.
- In channels: when you're @-mentioned or post a message, your avatar carries your current presence indicator.
- In the "Members" panel of a team or channel: a roster view showing everyone's current state.
Critically, Teams also shows a "Last active" timestamp in some contexts — particularly in 1:1 chats where Teams will display "Last seen 10 minutes ago" or similar. This is calculated separately from the presence indicator and can betray a long absence even if your dot is green.
How Stay Green On Teams Keeps Your Dot Green
Stay Green On Teams takes a different approach from manual controls. Instead of relying on your local Teams client to signal activity, our service connects to Microsoft's presence infrastructure from the cloud — using your own session credentials — and maintains your "Available" presence indefinitely from a server.
From Microsoft's perspective, your account simply has another active Teams client connected at all times. From your perspective, you can close your laptop, leave Teams entirely, and your dot stays green for the hours you've scheduled. There's no mouse jiggler running, no browser tab to keep open, no manual override that quietly expires.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many status icons does Microsoft Teams have?
Microsoft Teams has eight presence indicators: Available, Busy, Do Not Disturb, Be Right Back, Away, Appear Away, Offline, and Out of Office. Each has a distinct colour and meaning, and they're controlled by a mix of automatic activity detection, calendar integration, and manual selection.
What's the difference between Away and Appear Away?
Away is automatic — Teams sets it when you've been inactive for ~5 minutes. Appear Away is manual — you deliberately set it while still being able to see and respond to messages. The visual indicator is identical, so others can't tell them apart.
Does Teams show me as Away even when I'm in a meeting elsewhere?
Yes. Teams only detects activity in its own client — mouse and keyboard input, or the Teams window having focus. If you're in a Zoom call or Google Meet, Teams doesn't see that activity and will flip you to Away after ~5 minutes.
Can I disable the automatic Away status in Microsoft Teams?
No — Microsoft does not expose a setting to disable or extend the inactivity timeout. You can manually set yourself to Available, but Teams will eventually override the manual selection if it detects no activity. To keep Teams Available indefinitely without leaving your computer on, you need an external solution like Stay Green On Teams that maintains presence from the cloud.
What does the purple Teams icon mean?
The purple Teams status icon represents Out of Office, set automatically when you have an Outlook auto-reply scheduled. Teams pulls the out-of-office period from your Microsoft 365 calendar and returns to your normal status when it ends.
Does Teams show 'Last active' to other people?
In 1:1 chats and some other contexts, Teams shows a 'Last seen' timestamp. This is calculated independently of your presence indicator and can show a long absence even if your dot is still green — which is one reason cloud-based presence maintenance is more honest than manually setting Available.