Teams Live Events Retires June 30: How to Migrate to Town Halls

Microsoft Teams Live Events will stop accepting new event schedules on June 30, 2026. If your company uses Live Events for all-hands meetings, training sessions, or company-wide announcements, you have about one month to switch to Town Halls before you lose the ability to create large-scale virtual events in Teams.

The good news: Town Halls are already available in your Teams client, and Microsoft has been building them as the direct replacement since late 2023. The migration is straightforward if you plan it. The risk is doing nothing and discovering on July 1 that your next quarterly all-hands has no platform.

What Is Actually Changing

Microsoft announced the retirement of Teams Live Events as part of a broader shift toward the Town Hall event format. Here are the key dates:

• June 30, 2026: Live Events stops accepting new event creation. The option disappears from the Teams calendar.
• Through February 2027: Events that were already scheduled before June 30 will still run as planned. Attendees can join, presenters can broadcast, and recordings will work normally.
• After February 2027: All Live Events functionality is fully removed from Teams.

This means you don’t need to cancel events that are already on the calendar. But any new large-scale event after June 30 must use Town Halls. If your HR team typically schedules the Q3 all-hands in July, they need to learn the Town Hall interface before then.

Live Events vs. Town Halls: What Changed

Town Halls are not just a rename. Microsoft rebuilt the experience with different capabilities and a different attendee model. Some things got better; some things work differently than what your event producers are used to.

The biggest practical difference for event organizers is the producer workflow. Live Events had a separate production window where producers controlled what attendees saw. Town Halls use an integrated layout system where organizers manage the event from within the same Teams interface. Your producers will need 30 to 60 minutes of hands-on practice to adjust.

For attendees, the experience is similar. They join via a link, watch the broadcast, and submit questions. The transition should be transparent to most of your workforce.

The Microsoft Graph API Migration

If your IT team or a third-party application uses the Microsoft Graph API to create or manage Live Events programmatically, this is the part that requires developer attention.

Live Events used the isBroadcast property on the onlineMeeting resource type in Microsoft Graph. When isBroadcast was set to true, the API created a Live Event instead of a standard meeting. That property and the associated endpoints are being deprecated alongside Live Events.

The replacement is the Virtual Event API, a separate set of endpoints specifically designed for Town Halls and webinars. The key changes:

• Creating events: Replace POST /communications/onlineMeetings with isBroadcast: true with POST /solutions/virtualEvents/townhalls.
• Managing registrations: Town Halls have built-in registration support through virtualEventRegistration resources, replacing any custom registration workflows you built around Live Events.
• Retrieving attendee data: Attendance reports use the virtualEventSession resource with dedicated reporting endpoints rather than the meeting attendance report.
• Permissions: The Virtual Event API uses different permission scopes. Applications need VirtualEvent.ReadWrite.All or equivalent delegated permissions.

If you have Power Automate flows, custom integrations, or third-party event management tools that create Live Events through the Graph API, test them against the Virtual Event API now. Don’t wait until June 30 to discover that your automated event creation workflow stopped working.

For most businesses in the 50 to 500 employee range, this API change only matters if you have custom integrations. If your team creates events manually through the Teams interface, the API migration does not affect you directly.

Migration Checklist: What to Do Before June 30

This checklist covers the steps your team needs to complete before the deadline. Assign an owner for each item and set a target date.

Week 1: Audit Your Current Usage

• Inventory all scheduled Live Events. Check the Teams admin center for any events scheduled between now and February 2027. These will continue to work, but note them so you know what’s in flight.
• Identify event producers. Make a list of everyone in your organization who has created or produced a Live Event in the past 12 months. These are the people who need retraining on Town Halls.
• Check for API integrations. Ask your IT team or managed IT provider whether any automated workflows create Live Events through the Microsoft Graph API. Include Power Automate flows, third-party tools, and custom scripts.
• Review your Teams licensing. Town Halls are included in Microsoft Teams. Town Halls with advanced features (200,000 attendee capacity, custom branding, managed Q&A) require Teams Premium. Confirm your licenses cover the features you need.

Week 2: Set Up and Test Town Halls

• Create a test Town Hall. Have one of your event producers schedule a Town Hall for an internal audience. Walk through the full process: scheduling, adding co-organizers, configuring Q&A, setting up RTMP-In if you use external encoders, and starting the broadcast.
• Compare the producer experience. The layout controls, attendee management, and Q&A moderation tools work differently from Live Events. Document the differences so you can train other producers.
• Test recording and captions. Verify that recordings save to the expected location and that captions work for your audience.
• Validate any integrations. If you identified Graph API integrations in Week 1, test them against the Virtual Event API in a non-production environment.

Week 3: Train and Communicate

• Train your event producers. A 30-minute walkthrough is enough for most producers. Focus on scheduling, the organizer interface, Q&A management, and how to start and end the broadcast. Microsoft’s official migration guide includes step-by-step comparisons.
• Notify event stakeholders. Send a brief message to HR, internal communications, and any department that regularly hosts large meetings. Let them know the change is happening and that all new large-scale events after June 30 will use Town Halls.
• Update internal documentation. If you have runbooks, SOPs, or training materials that reference Live Events, update them to reference Town Halls.

Week 4: Confirm Readiness

• Verify no new Live Events are scheduled after June 30. Check the admin center one more time to confirm no one created a Live Event for July or later.
• Confirm API migration is complete. If you had automated integrations, verify they’re pointing to the Virtual Event API and creating Town Halls successfully.
• Close the loop with leadership. A one-paragraph update to your COO or VP of Operations confirming the migration is complete. They don’t need details, just confirmation that the next all-hands will work.

Common Questions From Business Leaders

“Do we need to cancel events we already scheduled?” No. Events already on the calendar using Live Events will run as planned through February 2027. You do not need to reschedule existing events as Town Halls.

“Is this going to cost us more?” Basic Town Halls are included in your existing Teams license at no additional cost. If you need features like custom branding, higher attendee limits, or managed Q&A, those require Teams Premium licensing. For most companies running standard all-hands meetings, the free tier is sufficient.

“What if we just stop doing large virtual events?” That’s a business decision, not a technology one. But if your company has been running quarterly all-hands, annual open enrollment meetings, or company-wide training sessions through Live Events, those needs don’t disappear because the platform changed. Town Halls are the path of least resistance for maintaining that capability within Microsoft Teams.

“Our IT team is already busy. How much effort is this?” For organizations that create Live Events manually through the Teams interface, the migration effort is small. It’s primarily retraining event producers and updating documentation. The timeline above spreads it across four weeks, but the actual hands-on work is a few hours total. The Graph API migration, if it applies to you, is the only part that requires real development time.

Don’t Wait for the Deadline

Microsoft retirements tend to follow a pattern: the announcement happens months in advance, most organizations postpone until the last week, and then IT teams scramble while employees discover their scheduled events can’t be created. The Office 365 Connectors retirement last week followed exactly this pattern, with organizations discovering broken workflows the day after the cutoff.

One month is enough time to handle this well. Your event producers need a practice session, your IT team needs to check for API integrations, and your leadership needs a heads-up that the next all-hands will look slightly different. None of that is hard. All of it gets harder if you wait until June 29.

Start with a 15-minute conversation with whoever manages your Teams environment. Ask them two questions: how many Live Events have we run in the past year, and do any automated systems create them through the API? Those answers will tell you whether this is a two-hour project or a two-week one. Either way, it’s better to know now than on July 1.