Teams Offline Presence Notification

Dear @Ross Cordelia

I completely understand how confusing it can be when status notifications seem to report logouts without showing the initial logins. To address your core question directly: This is expected behavior in Microsoft Teams and not a bug.

Here is why this happens:

• Why you don't receive sign-in notifications: The "Notify when available" feature triggers only when a user's presence state shifts from Offline/Away to Available. When a user manually sets their status to "Appear offline", Teams intentionally suppresses their active login state to protect their privacy. Because their displayed status remains locked as "Offline," Teams never registers an "Available" state transition, so no sign-in banner is generated.
• Why you receive "X is offline" notifications: When the user closes the Teams application or logs out completely, the backend service terminates their active connection. Teams updates their system-level presence to a true Offline state. This actual connection drop triggers the status notification service to broadcast that the user is now offline, even if their visual badge previously appeared as "Offline" or "Out of Office".

In short, "Appear offline" hides the Online/Available transition by design, but full app disconnects still fire the backend Offline event. For official documentation on presence states and notification behaviors, you can review Microsoft's guide on User presence in Microsoft Teams.

If you suspect your client is missing valid presence alerts outside of the scenario described above, we can isolate the issue further:

• If you set a status notification for a different colleague who goes from a normal "Offline" to "Available" state, do you receive the alert?
• Test on Teams Web App: If you log into Teams on the Web, does the notification behavior match what you see on the desktop app?

Check multi-device usage: Is the target user signed into Teams on multiple devices (e.g., mobile phone and laptop simultaneously)? Multiple active sessions can occasionally cause delayed presence triggers.

To clear any potential cached presence data on your end, please try the following:

• Sign out & Sign back in: Click your profile picture/icon, select Sign out, close the app, and log back in to force a fresh connection to the presence service.
• Clear Teams Cache: Fully exit Teams (right-click Teams in the taskbar > Quit). Press Win + R, paste %localappdata%\Packages\MSTeams_8wekyb3d8bbwe (for new Teams), delete the folder contents, and restart Teams. Please refer to this document: Clear the Teams client cache.

Please let me know how it goes or if you have any further questions

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