Teams away setting automatically switching on when not away

You'll notice Steven is no longer replying.  Typical of MS.  A few canned answers and then silence.

While I agree completely with the sentiments of the other commenters, there is also nothing he can do about it.

He did point you in the right direction though:

"we recommend you kindly give your feedback and share your experience via our UserVoice Service. Every customer’s voice is important to us. The related engineers will design or upgrade features referring to customers’ feedback and your ideas will help us to make our product and features better for you."

UserVoice is the only place they will listen to suggestions for improvement.  They dont look in forums like this.  That link will take you directly to the UserVoice dedicated to Teams.  Voice your complaints about this problem there and it will get noticed by MS engineers much quicker, especially if they get many complaints.

Completely agree with this whole thread. In Skype Business you can set the time before 'inactive' kicks in to a couple of hours if needed, which is fantastic if you are like me and are on a multiple hour Zoom call or back-to-back Zoom calls, but can still multi-task and respond to IMs. Skype Business also tells how long you've been inactive, which helps people know if they've been away for 5 min or 3 hours. If it is 3 hours, they are probably gone for the day, so don't sit there and hold your breadth you'll be able to talk to them yet today.

Recently received this O365 update notification.  Hopefully this will fix the problem we've been having.

I have the same issue. I am certain this can be resolved if Microsoft dedicates some resources to it.  My professional organization uses Slack. The app handles "status" beautifully.  There are no automatic or default changes. It keeps your the message you select until you personally change it.  It also enables you to easily customize your status, and set dates and times for a particular status.  For example, you can say "On Vacation" and enable that message from 8 a.m. on Monday, month/day to 10 a.m. on Thursday, month/day, etc.

Hi Kathleen,

I have consulted our engineers further about your problem. If we don't work on Teams although Teams is running in the background and we work on our computer, the status will be changed to Away after five minutes automatically. 

Given your situation, there is a workaround you can have a try. You can set a status message and show the message when someone message you so that your co-workers know you are available at that time. To do that, please click on your profile picture and select Set status message, then type any status message like "I'm available." in and check the Show when people message me option. You can also set the time when the message can be cleared. After setting it, click Done to save the changes. Then your co-worker will be able to see your status message when they message you or @mention you.

Hope this can help you and welcome back to share your feedback with me.

Regards,

Seven