Microsoft Teams black screen issue troubles users, but we have a few workarounds

A bunch of users are having a hard time with Microsoft Teams recently because the app fails to start and instead displays a plain black screen.

As a result, there have been several reports of the issue across the Microsoft forums as well as on Twitter from both macOS and Windows users.

@MicrosoftTeams crashes my (brand new) student laptop EVERY meeting. Kills it in a thousand different ways every time. This week was a black screen of death as soon as the host started to record.
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Anyone else seeing black screen flash when clicking in @Microsoft #Whiteboard and screen sharing with @MicrosoftTeams ? Doesn’t happen when not screen sharing, nor when sharing other applications.
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Judging by numerous reports, it’s clear that users are facing a black screen on Microsoft Teams during several different scenarios.

Most reports, as already mentioned above, state that their Microsoft Teams app fails to even start and instead goes into a black screen state. In such a case, even restarting the app or clearing its cache doesn’t help.

There are also plenty of complaints about the camera not working and going black on Microsoft Teams. Lastly, a few users say that they’re having trouble screen sharing.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any official acknowledgment to date, but we did find a few workarounds that may help, at least on Windows. You are free to give them a try of course.

1. Launch Microsoft Teams from a meeting link: If your Microsoft Teams app is unable to start correctly, then you may try the following:

2. Kill all Microsoft Teams tasks: Several users were able to work around the black screen issue by simply killing all processes associated with the app and restarting it.

A solution that works for me and does not require computer restart:
1. Hit `Win+R` to open a console prompt.
2. Kill all processes that have teams in their name with this command:
taskkill /IM “teams*” /F
3. Launch Teams.
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You can do the same via the Windows Task Manager as well.

3. Commands to get camera working: If your camera doesn’t work on Microsoft Teams, then you can try executing the following commands as mentioned below by a user. They do the job for those using a MacBook with Windows 10 Boot Camp option.

1. Quit Teams application completely
2. Start cmd as administrator
3. Run this command:
echo {“RtmCodecsConfig”:{“CapturerApiForce”:”1″}} > %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams\SkypeRT\persistent.conf

4. Verify that %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams\SkypeRT\persistent.conf was updated as expected.
5. Start Teams again, and test the camera.
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