How to Delete a Microsoft Teams Meeting Chat

Before you start

In Microsoft Teams, meeting chat is tied to the meeting thread in the Chat area, while the meeting itself appears in the calendar. Deleting a meeting chat does not remove the meeting invitation or cancel the meeting. Also, a regular attendee cannot delete the whole meeting chat for everyone. You can delete your own messages, and in some cases a meeting organizer or chat owner may remove individual messages, but Teams does not provide a simple universal delete button for the entire meeting conversation.

Step-by-step instructions

Open Teams on the desktop app or in a browser. On the left side, select Chat. Find the meeting chat in the chat list and open it. Hover over a message you wrote, select the more options icon, and choose Delete to remove only your own message. For a message you are allowed to remove for everyone, Teams will show a Delete for everyone option in the same menu. Repeat this for each message you want to remove.

If you no longer want the meeting chat to appear in your own chat list, you can hide the conversation. Open the chat list, hover over the meeting chat, select the more options icon, and choose Hide. In the mobile apps, the same option is available from the chat list after a long press or from the conversation menu, depending on the app version. Hiding does not delete the chat for other participants.

In some versions of Teams, meeting organizers may also adjust chat settings when setting up or editing a meeting. Check the meeting options for controls over who can write in the meeting chat, but do not rely on these settings to permanently delete an existing conversation.

Check the output

After you delete a message, it should disappear from the visible conversation for the people included in the delete action. A note such as "This message has been deleted" may remain in some cases. To verify that a chat is hidden, confirm that it no longer appears in your default chat list. Keep in mind that hidden chats can reappear if someone sends a new message in that conversation.

Common problems and next steps

If you do not see a delete option for a message, you may not have permission to delete it. Messages sent by others are usually not deletable by a regular participant. The meeting organizer or a team owner with the relevant role has more control. If you want to remove past meeting conversations, deleting every message one by one is often the only built-in approach available to a participant.

For recurring meetings, the chat can belong to the recurring meeting series. Deleting individual messages does not prevent the next recurrence from using the same chat area. If the chat setting does not match your expectation, compare the Teams desktop, web, and mobile clients, because the labels and menus can differ between versions. If all else fails, check the meeting options in Teams and verify that you have the organizer or chat-owner role required for the removal action you want to make.