Microsoft Teams is used all over the world for online collaboration, especially in this era of hybrid work. It is typically the top choice of organizations which already use a Microsoft tech stack including Windows, Microsoft 365 Commercial, Outlook, Dynamics 365, Power BI, and more. However, Microsoft has issued an advisory today (along with MC422140 for IT admins), stating that Teams users in China may face a degraded experience throughout the month of September 2022.
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For those unaware, Teams users in China utilize the software services through the dedicated China Premium network using the public internet. However, Microsoft is in the process of upgrading this network and it scheduled a maintenance window that actually began on August 24 and will complete on September 30.
During this rather wide window, Teams users in China joining a meeting being hosted on a data center outside of Asia Pacific will have to use China"s regular cross-border network service, which may result in a degraded experience.
One rather interesting workaround that Microsoft has shared is that if Teams users in China are the first to start a cross-region meeting, the meeting will be hosted on an Asia Pacific data center and they will have a decent Teams experience. Failure to do so may result in poor audio and video quality, along with screen-sharing issues.
Microsoft has also outlined several ways in which IT admins can validate if their tenants are experiencing Teams issues, you can check out all the configuration and administration details here.