Although Teams is Microsoft"s flagship software for online communication and collaboration, and is used heavily in work, government, and enterprise environments, it does come with its fair share of issues. Recently, the service suffered an outage, and separately, the company had to detail a "fix" for a longstanding annoyance in Teams. Now, Teams on macOS is facing another problem, but this time, Microsoft is placing the blame squarely on Apple.
As spotted by Bleeping Computer, Teams customers have been taking to social platforms like Reddit to complain about the app"s persistent pop-ups on macOS, demanding access to their location. Although many keep clicking "Don"t Allow" to dismiss the pop-up, it keeps returning with the message "Microsoft Teams ModuleHost would like to use your current location".
While many naturally assumed that this is happening due to a bug in Teams, Microsoft posted a message in its Admin Center to explain that the pop-up is being triggered by a faulty macOS security update:
We"ve identified that a recent macOS security update doesn"t store users" location permission selections for Teams as expected, resulting in repeated location prompts. We"re working with Apple to better understand the change and identify a resolution. In parallel, we"re investigating a potential fix within Teams to mitigate the repeated prompts.
A temporary mitigation involves opening your device"s settings, navigating to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services, and toggling location access for "Microsoft Teams" and "Microsoft Teams ModuleHost" to on and off, before setting it to your desired configuration.
At least the mitigation is relatively simple to apply, as the bug itself is quite annoying. Microsoft has tagged its message as "advisory", which indicates that the scope and impact of this issue are limited. As of now, macOS 14 Sonoma, 15 Sequoia, and 26 Tahoe are known to be directly affected, but it seems like the bug is only being triggered for a subset of customers. Microsoft has not detailed a timeline for a concrete fix yet, but expect a patch to land soon.