External presenter can't join in a Town Hall meeting

Dear @Anonymous,

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

Based on how Town halls are pre‑configured in Teams, a few settings can interact in confusing ways, and these behaviors can be due to many reasons:

• Green room is ON by default for Town halls. The Town hall template automatically enables a backstage green room for organizers/co‑organizers/presenters. Attendees never enter it. If someone is not recognized as a presenter, they won’t get into that green room and may appear to be “blocked” (or land in a lobby/attendee pre‑event page).
• Who can bypass the lobby / anonymous & external join policies. Even if you “disabled the waiting room,” the effective behavior still depends on meeting options and your tenant’s meeting policies (e.g., Who can bypass the lobby? Anonymous users can join a meeting). If the event was set to allow only “People in my org and guests” to bypass the lobby, an external presenter who isn’t a guest (or who joins with the wrong identity) will not be treated as a presenter and may be held or blocked until admitted.
• Identity mismatch (very common for external presenters). Town halls expect the presenter to join with the exact identity you added as an external presenter. If they click their unique link while already signed in to Teams with a different account (work/school or personal), Teams can’t map them to the presenter role. Therefore, they either can’t enter the green room, or they join as an attendee.
• Join order vs. role resolution. Because Town halls are structured meetings with green room, the first organizer/presenter who opens the event often “sets the stage.” If your external presenter enters before internal moderators, and their identity matches, they’ll land correctly in the green room. If internal moderators join first and the external’s identity is off (or their link/session is cached under another account), they may be rejected as a presenter until an organizer promotes/admits them. That would explain your “works if external joins first” observation and why a later re‑test (Aug 21) worked after things/roles had propagated.
• For reference:
  • Get started with town hall in Microsoft Teams
  • Using the lobby in Microsoft Teams meetings
  • Using the green room in Microsoft Teams

Moreover, why “Invited” people appear in search:

• Teams keeps a recent contacts cache that includes:
  • People you’ve chatted with
    • People you’ve emailed through Outlook integration
      • External participants you invited to meetings (even if they never joined)
• These external contacts show up with the label Invited and their email address. It’s a convenience feature so you can quickly re-invite or message them without typing the full address.

According to my research, the behavior you saw is consistent with a combination of Town hall’s green room defaults, lobby/bypass settings, and an identity mismatch on the external side, rather than a Windows update.

Here are some ways that you can check right now:

• Open the Town hall’s Meeting options and confirm:
  • Who can bypass the lobby? set to Everyone (at least for large public‑facing Town halls).
  • People dialing in can bypass the lobby > On if you use dial‑in.
  • Enable green room > OK to keep On, but be aware it amplifies role
• Tenant/meeting policies (if you have admin access):
  • In Teams admin center, ensure Anonymous users can join a meeting (if you intend to allow browser‑based externals) and review Automatically admit people defaults. Use the Teams admin center to manage lobby options in meetings hosted by your organization

Recommendations for Future Town Halls

• Join in a private/incognito browser (Edge InPrivate / Chrome Incognito). Click Continue on this browser, then sign in with the same email we used to invite you. (Avoid being auto‑signed into a different tenant/account.)
• Arrive 10 minutes early so we can verify you’re in the green room (you’ll see only organizers/presenters there).
• Have Teams desktop as a backup (latest build) in case the browser session is locked to the wrong account.
• If you see “You don’t have access” or get stuck in a lobby, message the organizer; we can promote you if needed and double‑check meeting options.
• If you must dial in, know that you’ll join as an attendee until an organizer promotes you

If the issue still persists, please look for any error messages that appear. If possible, please kindly share your screenshot for better investigating.

I hope this information is helpful. Please follow these steps and let me know if it works for you. If not, we can work together to resolve this.

Thank you for your patience and your understanding. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

I'm looking forward for your reply.

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