Microsoft Teams can now cram 20,000 people into your virtual meetings

Sometimes, you just need to cram 20,000 people into the virtual conference room.

What you need to know

• Microsoft Teams now supports up to 20,000 people in view-only meetings.
• Up to 1,000 people are now supported in interactive meetings.
• Upcoming changes will let you set up a "branded" meeting lobby.

Microsoft is massively expanding Teams meetings today. The company announced via a new blog post that meetings can now support up to 20,000 participants. While that upper limit applies only to view-only meetings, interactive meetings are also expanding to support up to 1,000 participants.

"Reach larger audiences to stay connected with your employees, customers, and partners," Microsoft said in the blog post. "When building this capability, we were focused on your meeting experience, making sure that even as the meeting scales it is still easy to manage and listen to the speakers. Therefore, we limited the size of interactive meetings to 1,000 participants, with a seamless shift to a 'view only' mode after the limit is met."

The increased meeting limit was initially announced in July alongside a bunch of other Microsoft 365 updates. As more people are working from home, companies and organizations may find themselves needing to hold meetings with huge numbers of participants. These expansions make that a lot easier.

In addition to the improvements to meeting limits, Microsoft also has a couple of other changes in the works for Teams. In the "coming months," Microsoft plans to launch branded meeting lobbies that let you place your logo as the background. Beyond that, Microsoft says branding will extend "to the core meeting experience" later.

Microsoft Teams branded lobby.

These new capabilities are all launching in the new Advanced Communications plan, which Microsoft has made available as an add-on for Microsoft 365 and Office 365 paid subscriptions this week. There's also a 60-day free trial available through the admin center. The free trial will be available on the Microsoft Teams site in "mid-August," Microsoft says.