Shared channel not visible to members of target team

Question

Shared channel not visible to members of target team

Tom 125

We have a shared channel, which was previously successfully shared to another team in the same tenant.

We have removed that share in order to share it to another team as part of an reorganization. And now it gets weird...

When choosing the team to share with, some of the teams are shown to have 0 (zero!) members which is not the case while other are shown having members!

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After sharing the channel to that 0-member-team, the channel is not shown to any member (but me as owner/admin). While the channel is shown in the channel list of that target team to each user, the button to hide/unhide is missing. When trying to show that shannel in the favorites section an error message is shown stating this is not possible. What's wrong here?
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Answer accepted by question author

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Answer 1

Demi-N 9,430 Microsoft External Staff Moderator

Hello @Tom,

Thank you for posting your question in the Microsoft Q&A Forum.

We’d like to gather some additional information to better understand the situation and provide accurate guidance.

Could you please confirm the following:

The team you are trying to share the channel with, what type of team is it (e.g., standard team, private team)?
If you share this same shared channel with another team, does the same issue occur or is it specific to the affected team?
If you create a new shared channel and share it with the affected team, does the problem persist?

Additionally, we’d like to clarify the steps you followed:

Did you perform the sharing action using Teams Web client or the Teams desktop app?
For the users who cannot see the shared channel, could you ask them to check using Teams Web client? If the channel appears normally on the web, please try clearing the cache on the desktop app and sign in again.
For your convenience, here’s a helpful guide: Clear the Teams client cache - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn

Once we have this information, we’ll be able to guide you through the next steps. Thank you for your patience and cooperation, we appreciate your effort in helping us troubleshoot this.

Looking forward to your response.

If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Tom 125 Reputation points

2025-12-10T10:31:22.5366667+00:00
The team you are trying to share the channel with, what type of team is it (e.g., standard team, private team)?

standard team, anyone to join

If you share this same shared channel with another team, does the same issue occur or is it specific to the affected team?

the error shown is specific to that team presumably due to adding, removing, re-adding, ...

If you create a new shared channel and share it with the affected team, does the problem persist?

no, seems not. The targetted teams are now mostly shown with members to be assigned

this might be related to changes of the owner of that shared channel, as previuously there was no owner, probably someone having left the company or the team the shared channel is home based

Did you perform the sharing action using Teams Web client or the Teams desktop app?

Desktop App (both from Mac and Windows device)

For the users who cannot see the shared channel, could you ask them to check using Teams Web client? If the channel appears normally on the web, please try clearing the cache on the desktop app and sign in again.

one user was able to unhide the channel in the web which results in the channel to be shown in the desktop client again, he was able to post a message, but after cleaning up some test steps (removing that user as the owner of the target, removing the shared channel from another team) he was no longer able to see the content of the chat, neither in desktop nor webclient
Tom 125 Reputation points

2025-12-10T13:19:08.42+00:00
most proper solutions seem to be:

unhiding in webclient results in displaying the channel in the desktop client as well

otherwise go through Clear the Teams client cache - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn
Demi-N 9,430 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2025-12-10T15:16:14.01+00:00

Hi @Tom,

Thank you very much for providing more information. Based on what you’ve shared, it appears that this issue is affecting multiple users across your tenant. Because of this broader impact, I strongly recommend reaching out to your organization’s admin and asking them to open a support ticket with Microsoft via Admin center > "Help& support"

I truly wish I could assist you more directly, but as a forum moderator, my tools and access are limited, and I’m not able to perform backend‑level checks myself. That’s why submitting a support ticket is the most reliable way to move this forward.

if you have any updates or run into any difficulties, please feel free to reach back out, I’m here to support you as much as I can.

Thank you again for taking the time to follow up.
Tom 125 Reputation points

2025-12-12T07:50:56.7566667+00:00

Thanks, clearing the cache made it work for the ones affected.
Demi-N 9,430 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2025-12-12T14:52:38.57+00:00

Hi @Tom,

I'm very glad to hear that your issue was resolved by clearing the cache. If the information I shared was helpful, I kindly encourage you to mark it as the Accepted Answer. Doing so not only acknowledges the solution but also helps other community members facing the same problem find a reliable reference.

Thank you and have a great day!

Answer 2

Tom 125

Update: one user working with the webclient can see the shared channel, while others with den desktop client (Windows) can't...

Is this all about caching?

Answer 3

Tom 125

When moving back and forth to find a workaround, now this error occurred:

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And I do not know where to find more info about this issue...

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Shared channel not visible to members of target team

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