Last updated: September 2026 | Reviewed by: AppFixGuide Microsoft Teams Team | Read time: 8 minutes
Getting randomly signed out of Teams — sometimes mid-meeting — is more than an inconvenience; it usually points to something specific happening with your organization’s security policies, your cached credentials, or a background sync issue. We tested the most common patterns to find what actually stops it for good.
Quick Answer
Frequent Teams sign-outs are usually caused by a short session/token expiry policy set by your organization’s IT admin, a corrupted local Teams cache, or conflicting credentials from multiple Microsoft accounts on the same device. Clearing the Teams cache and checking for conflicting accounts resolves this for most personal and small-business users; for company-managed accounts, the fix often requires an IT admin adjusting session policy.
Why Teams Keeps Signing You Out
1. Organization Session Policies (Conditional Access)
Many organizations configure Microsoft 365’s Conditional Access or session timeout policies to force periodic re-authentication for security reasons — sometimes as often as every few hours. If this is the cause, it isn’t a bug at all; it’s IT policy working as designed, and only an admin can extend it.
2. Corrupted Local Cache
The Teams desktop app stores a local cache of your session and credentials. If this cache becomes corrupted — often after an unexpected app crash or an interrupted update — Teams can repeatedly fail to maintain your login even though your credentials themselves are correct.
3. Multiple Microsoft Accounts Conflicting
If you’re signed into Windows or your browser with a personal Microsoft account and also using a separate work/school account in Teams, the two can occasionally conflict, especially around single sign-on (SSO), causing Teams to silently drop your session.
4. Outdated App Version
Older versions of Teams have shipped with known authentication bugs that Microsoft has since patched. Running an outdated build is a common, easily overlooked cause of repeated sign-outs.
5. Password or MFA Changes Not Fully Propagated
If you or your IT admin recently changed your password or reset multi-factor authentication, cached credentials on some of your devices can keep trying to use the old session information for a short period, triggering repeated sign-out prompts until everything fully syncs.
Step-by-Step Fix
Step 1: Clear the Teams Cache
- Fully quit Teams (right-click the system tray icon → Quit).
- On Windows, open File Explorer and go to
%appdata%\Microsoft\Teams. - Delete the contents of the “Cache,” “blob_storage,” and “GPUCache” folders.
- On Mac, go to
~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Teamsand clear the same folders. - Reopen Teams and sign in fresh.
Step 2: Sign Out of Conflicting Accounts
If you use multiple Microsoft accounts on the same device, sign out of the ones you’re not actively using for Teams, particularly in your browser and Windows account settings, to remove any SSO ambiguity.
Step 3: Update Teams to the Latest Version
Click your profile picture → Check for updates. Authentication bugs are patched regularly, and an outdated client is one of the easiest causes to rule out.
Step 4: Check With Your IT Admin About Session Policy
If you’re on a work or school account and the sign-outs happen at a consistent, predictable interval (for example, exactly every 8 hours), this is very likely an intentional Conditional Access session policy. Ask your IT admin whether the sign-in frequency setting can be adjusted for your role.
Step 5: Reinstall Teams
If clearing the cache doesn’t resolve it, a full uninstall and reinstall clears any deeper corruption in the local app data that a simple cache clear might miss.
Step 6: Check for Device-Level Sync Issues
On Windows, make sure your device is properly Azure AD joined or hybrid joined if your organization requires it — a broken device trust relationship can cause repeated authentication failures that look like random sign-outs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is getting signed out of Teams every few hours normal?
For work/school accounts, yes — many organizations intentionally set short session lifespans for security. If it’s happening on a personal account with no organizational policy involved, it’s more likely a cache or app issue (Steps 1–3).
Does clearing my cache delete my chat history?
No. Your messages and files are stored in the cloud, not locally, so clearing the local cache only removes temporary files and forces Teams to re-download what it needs — it doesn’t delete anything from your account.
Why does this happen more often on my personal laptop than my work laptop?
Work laptops are often properly device-joined to your organization’s identity system, which keeps sessions more stable. A personal device relying purely on username/password sign-in is more exposed to session conflicts and cache issues.
About This Guide
This guide was compiled by the AppFixGuide Microsoft Teams team based on testing across personal and organization-managed Microsoft 365 accounts on Windows 11 and macOS.