This browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Hi there,
My teams status is constantly switching to "away" while I am working on my computer. This is very frustrating as my co-workers need to know when I am actually away or available.
Is there a manual override for this? It would be excellent to be able to set it as available so that my team knows they can reach my even if I am working on paper, or in this case if it has switched itself to "away".
Thanks!
Additional features, settings, or issues not covered by specific Microsoft Teams categories
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
This is horrible that MS hasn't fixed this. Eventually, they will when enough people jump ship. We have customers moving over to Slack and other messages collaboration apps. Even as an MS Partner, I cannot in good conscience recommend teams.
Here's another decent one to vote up (currently around 650 votes):
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/40690777-away-status
As well as this older one (currently around 1,150 votes):
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/908686-bug-reports/suggestions/41278342-teams-now-setting-my-status-to-away-after-10-min
Luckily there's a hardware solution for something that Microsoft is apparently unable to solve programmatically:
I think that Microsoft is selling their 5-minute-Away-User-Productivity-Check as a feature, but they don't realize that it's making users everywhere hate Teams. It's a matter of time before another Slack comes along to make everybody switch en-masse.
Microsoft, can you add some code to Teams to make the mouse move around so that your code understands that the status should not be "Away"? Maybe that can be added as a plugin? I would pay for that if I hadn't already bought a hardware solution.
I would like to point out that this wasn't always the case, before (I want to say up until June this year) you would be able to set your status to always show that you are available or at least set the time limit on how long you are available, which is important to some folk who don't constantly work in MS Teams. I mostly work out of Chrome, Outlook, MS Word, Excel, and PPT so it's annoying to have to always keep an eye on Teams and then click on it when it shows that I'm away. I think in this current new normal it is extremely important that Microsoft fixes this upgrade (I don't even want to call it a bug because this function was change in an upgrade) because we need to be able to let our teams, colleagues, and managers know that we are available and working so that assumptions are not made about our work performance.
Same issue as well with my company. This is honestly ridiculous Microsoft hasn't fixed this in two months.