Teams Keeps Freezing or Crashing Mid-Meeting? Here's the Fix

Teams freezing mid-call is usually one of three things: a local resource problem (too much running on your machine), a corrupted local cache, or a network issue that Teams handles badly instead of failing gracefully. The fixes below go from quickest to most disruptive — work through them in order rather than jumping to a reinstall.

1. Check what else is running

Teams is resource-hungry, especially with video on. If your laptop is also running a dozen browser tabs, a video editor, or another conferencing app in the background, Teams is often the first thing to choke.

• Turn off your own camera if you don't need it — this alone significantly cuts CPU and bandwidth use.
• Close unused browser tabs and any heavy background apps before a call you know matters.
• On Windows, check Task Manager > Performance during a call. If CPU or memory is pinned near 100%, that's your answer.

2. Clear the Teams cache

The new Teams client still keeps a local cache that can become corrupted after updates or abrupt shutdowns, and a bad cache is one of the most common causes of freezing that "comes out of nowhere."

1. Fully quit Teams — right-click the Teams icon in the system tray (bottom-right on Windows) and choose Quit, not just closing the window.
2. Open File Explorer and go to %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams (classic Teams) or %localappdata%\Packages and look for the Teams folder (new Teams).
3. Delete the contents of the Cache, blob_storage, and GPUCache folders if present. Don't delete the whole Teams folder itself, just these subfolders.
4. Reopen Teams. It rebuilds the cache automatically, which often resolves freezing that nothing else touches.

3. Switch from wifi to wired, or vice versa

Video calls are far more sensitive to network jitter than to raw speed — a connection can show "fast" on a speed test and still cause Teams to freeze if packets arrive unevenly. If you're on wifi and freezing happens often, try a wired ethernet connection for one call and see if it's noticeably more stable. If you're already wired and still seeing freezes, the issue is more likely local resources or the cache, not the network.

4. Disable hardware acceleration

Teams uses your GPU to render video, and on some laptops — particularly ones with older or conflicting graphics drivers — this causes more freezing than it prevents.

1. Open Teams, click your profile picture, then Settings.
2. Look for a setting related to hardware acceleration or GPU rendering (the exact wording and location shifts between Teams versions).
3. Toggle it off, restart Teams, and test on your next call.

This trades a small amount of visual smoothness for stability — worth it if freezing is a recurring problem.

5. Update your graphics driver

An outdated GPU driver is a frequent, overlooked cause of video call crashes specifically (as opposed to general slowness). Check Device Manager > Display adapters, right-click your graphics card, and select Update driver. If you're on a managed device, this may require IT to push the update rather than doing it yourself.

6. When it's Teams itself, not your setup

• If freezing happens to multiple people on the same call at the same time, the problem is likely server-side or specific to that meeting (sometimes large meetings with many video streams strain Teams differently than 1:1 calls).
• Check the Microsoft 365 status page if it seems widespread.
• If only screen sharing (not video) triggers freezing, that's often specifically a hardware acceleration or display-scaling issue rather than a general network problem — revisit step 4.

The bottom line

Most "Teams freezes randomly" complaints trace back to local resource strain or a corrupted cache, not the network or Teams itself. Clearing the cache resolves the majority of recurring cases that survive a simple restart.