Teams Breakout Rooms not working as intended

Question

Teams Breakout Rooms not working as intended

Marek Orube (DHL DE) 0

Dear community,

I have trying to figure out how to manage breakout rooms in Teams Webinars the way I need them to work.

Here is what I need:

I create a Webinar for only specific people. The number of attendees and referees in total is below or equal1000. Noone can share/unmute/activate camera - only me, the organizer. I create 5 breakout rooms and assign all of the attendees PLUS the referees (2 per room) to their respective rooms. No one can share/unmute/activate camera in those rooms - only the referees. I start the Webinar. After a while I open the breakout rooms and all of the attendees as well as the referees are moved to their respective rooms automatically. When the time is over, I close the rooms and everyone is moved back to the main Webinar, where, again, only I can present.

From what I see it seems that: When I try to have one person being able to present in the breakout room, I have to make them Co-Organizer first, then create the room, then select "who can present" - "specific people" - the person. But first I have to remove that person from the Co-Organizer list of the breakout room. This in itself already makes zero sense to me. Especially since I do not want to grant the "breakout presenter" Co-Organizer rights at any moment. And that is also why I remove the Co-Organizer role in the main Webinar after setting up the breakout room.

And that's where it gets really weird. After many different tries, changing the settings and the order in which I did them, It did work - for one room only. The second room I set up will never apply the presenters right to the assigned person. It doesn't stop there. I have seen multiple people assigned to multiple rooms at the same time. I have seen that the assignment of people to rooms not applying. I have seen that my Co-Organizers can not be assigned to a room when they still have their role of Co-Organizer since they are not attendees.

I refuse to believe that my case is so niche that nobody else had this problem in the past. But I am willing to understand what I am doing wrong, if so.

Looking forward to your advice. Any kind of help is much appreciated.

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Answer 1

Hi @Marek Orube (DHL DE),

Thank you for your patience while I performed some additional testing in my own environment. I conducted testing in two separate Microsoft 365 E5 environments, one with a Teams Premium license and one without, and observed behavior very similar to what you described.

Based on both my testing and the current Microsoft documentation, I believe the behavior you're seeing is related primarily to how Teams handles the different meeting roles (Attendee, Presenter, Co-organizer, and Breakout Room Manager).

When I used Presenter only, I couldn't always get the user to fully function as the breakout room presenter.
When I temporarily added the user as a Co-organizer, configured the breakout room settings, and then removed the Co-organizer role afterwards, it sometimes worked, but not consistently.
Keeping the user as a Co-organizer was not a solution either, because co-organizers aren't treated like regular room participants. In my tests, they could join rooms themselves, but I could not assign them to a breakout room in the same way as an attendee. This also matches Microsoft's documentation for breakout room managers.

Based on my testing, I don't think you're doing anything obviously wrong. In fact, the inconsistent behavior you described (one room working, another not, presenter rights applying inconsistently, etc.) is quite close to what I observed.

Microsoft also documents that breakout room managers are not assigned to rooms and instead move freely between rooms, which suggests that the product isn't really designed around the scenario of having a co-organizer permanently assigned to a specific breakout room.

Benutzerbild

For your reference:

Also, the workaround of temporarily using the Co-organizer role appears to work in some cases, but I wasn't able to get consistent results either.

Since this behavior appears reproducible and affects the intended use of breakout rooms in webinars, I would recommend opening a support case with Microsoft. Support can collect logs and validate whether this is expected behavior, a known issue, or something that needs further investigation by the engineering team.

For business support:

Collect Teams diagnostic logs: To help Microsoft troubleshoot the issue, affected users should first collect Teams logs from their device. If multiple users are affected, logs from 2–3 impacted users are usually sufficient: Collect log files for monitoring and troubleshooting in Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn
Find your Microsoft 365 admin: If you don't know who the global admin is in your organization, you can find guidance here: How can I find my Microsoft 365 admin? - Microsoft Support
Submit a service request: The Global Administrator should create a support request with Microsoft to receive advanced technical assistance. For detailed instructions, see: Get support - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn

If your subscription is from a partner or reseller, contact the reseller's support provider to help open a service request on behalf of you instead.

If you discover any solutions or have additional insights, please consider replying to this thread to help others in the community.

I sincerely apologize for redirecting you to the Microsoft Technical Support Team. While I strive to assist as much as possible here in the forum, my resources are limited when it comes to backend-level diagnostics and advanced troubleshooting.

Thanks again for sharing your findings. It's actually reassuring to see someone else hitting the same behavior during testing.

Answer 2

Roebe Ta 1,545 Unabhängiger Berater

I will answer you in English based on your question description. As a friendly suggestion, posting in German may help your question reach a wider audience and increase the chances of receiving assistance from other community members.

Hi @Marek Orube (DHL DE),

Thank you for the detailed description.

I’ve been trying to research and reproduce the behavior you're seeing, but before jumping to any conclusions, I'd like to better understand your current configuration and setup.

Could you please clarify the following:

1. When you mention: "I have to remove that person from the Co-Organizer list of the breakout room", could you share the exact steps you are performing?

As far as I know, co-organizer is a meeting/webinar-level role, and I am not aware of a separate co-organizer list for individual breakout rooms. Are you referring to: the webinar's Co-organizer list, the Breakout room managers setting, or the "Who can present?" setting within the breakout room meeting options?

2. Have you tried adding the referees as Presenters only instead of Co-organizers?

If yes:

Were they able to unmute, use their camera, and share content in the breakout room?
Which specific capability was missing that made you promote them to Co-organizer?

3. Are the referees:

Internal users from your organization?
Guest users?
External users from another Microsoft 365 tenant?

4. When you say the second room never applies presenter rights to the assigned person:

Does the user still appear as an attendee in that breakout room?
What exactly happens when they try to unmute, start video, or share content?

5. Regarding users appearing in multiple rooms at the same time:

Is this visible during pre-assignment before the webinar starts, or only after the breakout rooms are opened?
Are you using the Teams desktop client or Teams web client while configuring the rooms?

Understanding these details will help determine whether you're hitting a product limitation, a configuration issue, or potentially a bug in the breakout room assignment process.

Looking forward to your response so we can get this sorted out for you together.

Marek Orube (DHL DE) 0 Zuverlässigkeitspunkte

2026-10-01T13:20:12.3833333+00:00
Thanks a lot for the detailed (and very quick) answer, let me get right to it :)

Where should I start - Yes, I mean that I add the "to be breakout presenter" to the list of Co-Organizers of the "base" Webinar. After that, I try to grant the right to share content within one specific breakout room only. To do so, I go into the breakout room options and select "specific people" under "who can present". If I only grant the role of Presenter to someone in the main Webinar, the field for "specific people" has a red border and i can't click it. If I grant the role of Co-Organizer to someone, I can select them in both: "breakout room co-organizer" and "who can present" in the breakout room options. I feel like hitting the boundaries of what I can explain with words, If it helps I could go on and do a step by step docoumentation adding screenshots.

I have, but as stated before: When doing so, I can not choose them from the "who can present" list.
I have to check again but if i recall correctly, they were not able to share their screen. I might be mistaken here, however, this would only be a partial solution since I do not want to have 5+ people with organizers rights, potentially messing with my webinar's settings. I just want them to present / host a breakout.

For this particular setup, referees and attendees are all internals from our organization.

In the second room, the person that "should" have the right to present (since I was able to pick them from the "who can present" list) was not able to share their screen. They can, however, unmute and activate camera, depending on the respective setting. This setting was always consistent in our tests.

This happened in the actual webinar, when I opened the breakout rooms. I could tell in which room they actually were, because only one of both "instances" had the options/menu icon besides them, from where I can manually grant presenter role, ask to unmute, etc.
I have been using the desktop client only until now and will further test with the browser version soon! One remark here: The breakout room options (and only these ones) will always open in a browser window.

I hope these details help :)

Best, Marek
Roebe Ta 1,545 Zuverlässigkeitspunkte Unabhängiger Berater

2026-10-01T15:23:35.6533333+00:00

Thank you for the additional details, @Marek Orube (DHL DE). This is very helpful and gives a much clearer picture of the behavior you're experiencing.

At the moment, I don't see anything obviously incorrect in the way you're configuring the webinar and breakout rooms. The fact that users must temporarily be added as Co-organizers before they become selectable under "Who can present", combined with the inconsistent screen-sharing behavior between rooms, suggests there may be either a product design or an issue with the current implementation.

I would like to perform some testing in my own environment to see whether I can reproduce the same behavior with webinars and breakout rooms. I'll provide an update with my findings by tomorrow.

Thank you again for taking the time to provide such detailed information.
Marek Orube (DHL DE) 0 Zuverlässigkeitspunkte

2026-10-02T06:17:46.84+00:00

You're very welcome, don't hesitate to comment and ask further, I am happy to assist on this since we really want MS Teams to work as our platform for virtual events in the future. Looking forward to read more :)