If Together mode has disappeared from your Teams meeting, don't start by counting how many people have their cameras on. Microsoft announced that the experience would retire from 30 June 2026.
The announcement appeared on the Microsoft 365 Insider blog in May. Microsoft's developer announcements repeated the retirement in June and explicitly included Custom Together Mode and Scene Studio. This wasn't simply a notice about one custom background. Microsoft's retirement notice, the original announcement.
Microsoft's notice to IT admins (message centre item MC1296478) said the option would be removed from the View menu, along with custom scenes and seat assignment, and that there's no admin policy or setting to keep it. So asking IT to switch it back on won't get you far.
That said, Teams has work, school and personal accounts, plus different clients and meeting types. The announcement isn't a live inventory of every account's menu. If your version still shows an option, go by the controls actually available to you. Just don't build next term's lessons around it.
Why old instructions can send you in circles
Together mode placed participants into a shared scene, such as an auditorium. It was more than blurring the room behind your own head.
There are still Microsoft help pages describing the old option. One Education guide still tells teachers to choose Together mode from View and says it works for 5 to 49 participants. That page describes a particular classroom experience; it doesn't establish that the feature remains available in every current Teams meeting. Microsoft's class-view guide.
So an older tutorial saying “turn on five cameras” may be accurate for the version it describes and still fail to solve your problem today.
Annoying, but a useful distinction.
Check the account and meeting type before trying somebody else's menu sequence. A work meeting on desktop and a personal call on a phone aren't interchangeable examples. Taking a note of those details will also make a support request more useful than “the button's gone”.
Pick the replacement by what you actually miss
If you liked seeing more faces, use a gallery layout. During a meeting, open View and look at the gallery choices available. Microsoft's meeting-view guide describes Gallery and Large gallery, with Large gallery available when at least ten people have their cameras on. It also explains changing the maximum gallery size. Current meeting-view guidance.
A grid of faces won't reproduce the shared room. But it can solve the practical problem of seeing the group rather than one speaker filling most of the window.
For one person you want to follow, hover over their video, open More options, then choose Pin for me. That changes your view. Organisers and presenters can instead use Spotlight for everyone when somebody needs to be prominent for the whole meeting. Those are different decisions, so check the label before clicking. Pinning and spotlighting.
If the shared seating was how you decided who spoke next, a gallery layout isn't a very clear replacement for that habit. Agree a speaking order, call on people by name, or ask the facilitator to keep track. Less theatrical. Also less dependent on everybody interpreting the same arrangement of faces.
For a workshop, it can help to say what you want from the layout before choosing it. Do participants need to see each other's reactions? Is somebody demonstrating a document? The arrangement that makes sense for one part may be irritating during the next.
Our Teams settings guide covers other adjustments worth checking. For the meeting itself, the ideas in our remote-work productivity guide are more useful than spending ten minutes searching for the old auditorium.
Common questions
Was only Custom Together Mode retired?
The developer notice names Together Mode, then says Custom Together Mode and Scene Studio will no longer be available. Treating that as a custom-scenes-only announcement leaves out its first sentence.
Can reinstalling Teams bring it back?
A reinstall isn't a way to reverse a product retirement, and Microsoft says there's no admin setting to keep it either. If several meeting controls have disappeared or the app is malfunctioning, that's a separate support problem. Explain which account and client you're using when reporting it.
Does pinning a video change what everyone sees?
Pin for me is your view. Spotlight for everyone is the shared emphasis available to organisers and presenters. Neither recreates a Together mode scene.
Does a missing Together mode option mean my camera is broken?
No. A missing layout option alone doesn't tell you that. Check whether your ordinary video works before troubleshooting the camera, and keep the retired feature separate from an actual camera fault.
Green Dotter is independent software and isn't affiliated with Microsoft.