Microsoft Teams: Notifications can wake up Apple Watch sleepers
With the focus on "Sleep", Apple Watch and iPhone owners should actually have peace and quiet at night. But Microsoft Teams doesn't always respect this.
Team logo on smartphone.
(Image: El editorial/Shutterstock)
Sleep tracking with the Apple Watch is useful, as the computer watch can record temperature, heart rate and – since watchOS 11 on certain models – also sleep apnea. In addition to sleep tracking, the Apple Watch uses a so-called sleep focus. This allows you to send both the watch and the paired iPhone to sleep at a specific time. You can set which apps should also send notifications to the Watch during sleep time. Alternatively, you can also exclude certain apps or define a group of people instead of individual apps who may or may not be put through. Telephony apps can also be controlled in this way. The problem: due to bugs – or possibly even deliberately –, some apps do not adhere to the sleep focus. A recent case experienced by the Mac & i editorial team is Microsoft Teams: it woke users with a watch vibration even when it wasn't supposed to. Confusingly, however, the issue does not occur for all users and sometimes only sporadically. At least there is a way to prevent it.
I want to sleep, but teams can't
An example: The sleep focus runs until 7 o'clock. Both the iPhone and Apple Watch (which mirrors the iPhone's notifications) should then remain quiet until this time. Apple Intelligence prioritization or an automatic focus mode have been switched off, as have time-critical messages (although these are not sent by Teams at all, at least according to the notification settings). Nevertheless, a message arrives at 6:57 a.m. from a colleague who has not even written directly to the person concerned. Instead, it is an "@channel" notification. Another Teams issue applies here: the application does not allow you to mute "@channel" mentions per channel on iOS – You can only deactivate them in general, which you don't necessarily want to do (in the desktop version, there is a setting per channel / team).
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But even if this were possible, the notification should not go through during the sleep focus because it is not explicitly allowed in these teams. This goes on for several days, Teams always gets through. At the same time, we discovered that Apple itself has a bug in the sleep focus: If you extend the sleep period for the current day at short notice (such as over the weekend), you are woken up later, but notifications are received again at the original time of the sleep focus end. With the result that you are naturally woken up again.
Traceability only so semi
The problem with the problem: We saw it on an iPhone, but not on another – that had an entirely different configuration – in a test run. The assumption that Microsoft is using some kind of trick to circumvent the sleep focus restrictions therefore remains just that: an assumption. However, it has been known for several years that Teams can penetrate the sleep focus, for example for calls. It has not yet been possible to explain why this happens. Those affected report a problem that has persisted for years and has also been ignored in the official Microsoft forum.
Our solution to the Teams sleep disorder was ultimately to use the quiet function built into Teams itself, which can be found under your avatar and settings. There you can define a quiet time during which Teams should no longer send any notifications. A time period can be selected here, for example 10 pm to 7 am. In our test, this actually worked: notifications were only received again after the time had expired. Even more confusing: when we switched the Quiet Time off again to check whether the sleep focus was still being disturbed, this suddenly no longer happened the following morning. We will continue to monitor the phenomenon and update this article if necessary.
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