Teams fails to load on Linux.

Murray Jones 51

Hello,

I have been using Teams on Linux for online learning for the past few months. Up until this morning, it has been working without issue.

As of this morning, when attempting to open Teams the following issue occurs:

White rectangle the size of teams window briefly appears, then vanishes.
Several seconds later, the system tray icon appears.
Finally, the blue window shown below appears, and continues to do nothing. It's not using any CPU, and I have tried just waiting. Nothing had happened after half an hour.
I have tried running teams as the root user for both of the above options, as well as without root permissions.
Yes, I've tried restarting the computor :)

131310-image.png

The only thing that I can Identify as having changed since Teams stopped working is that I ran an application update (sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade).

Here's what I have tried so far. None of these have made any difference:

Uninstalling Teams, and reinstalling from the .deb download on Microsoft's website.
I've also tried everything on this thread: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/35736/teams-on-linux-silently-crashes-my-linux-machine.html

Some stats about my system:

I am running Ubuntu 21.10 with the Xfce desktop environment.
Kernel is x86_64 Linux 5.13.0-14-generic
I am not short on RAM, CPU, or disk space - Teams has run just fine until today.

Here are the logs, as retrieved through the button in the system tray icon.

131279-logs.txt

Teams forms the basis for my year 12 online learning, so it's pretty important that I can get a quick resolution to this.

Thanks,

Murray.

Sharon Zhao-MSFT 25,056 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-09-13T07:43:04.977+00:00

@Murray Jones ,

It is suggested to use Teams web client(https://teams.microsoft.com) as a urgent workaround.

From your log file, I find the following error message -- getInstallOrUpdateTime failed. It seemingly points to your update operation(sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade).

I cannot get further more solutions for this now. We will research the log file carefully and do some more tests. If there is any update, I will share here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-09-13T08:43:21.453+00:00

What does the message "getInstallOrUpdateTime failed." actually mean, as a quick search online shows it is extremely common in almost every place a log is posted from Teams, most of which are taken from Windows....

I'm sure it "points to the update operation", in that we updated the client and the new one has a bug, but I think that error is very likely a red herring, given how common (and not platform specific) it appears to be.
Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-09-13T16:42:38.657+00:00

Whatever the issue is, it's tied to "settings.json" which gets written to ~/.config/Microsoft/Microsoft Teams if you don't log in, it writes around a 70K file, and then it can load again... but if you log in it writes around a 140K file and cannot load teams again.

If settngs.json is restored to a pre-logged in state then it can load again.
Sharon Zhao-MSFT 25,056 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-09-15T08:19:58.12+00:00

@Knevah , @Murray Jones ,
Agree with Knevah-5715, update should be a red herring because the client has already on the latest version.
Currently, we cannot repro this problem. And we are trying to install same OS version to try again. Any update I will share here.
Kristoffer Andergrim 6 Reputation points

2021-09-15T08:37:52.703+00:00

For me the problem occurred after updating from Ubuntu 20.04 to 21.10. Deleting the ~/.config/Microsoft directory before starting works, but I'm running the browser based version for now.
Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-09-15T15:19:06.57+00:00

I've spent a while looking at this, and I found 1 other software project that was impacted with the same error, looking at the stackdump generated by teams, it appears to be an identical problem... which is stems from glibc being more critical of incorrect types for "stacksize".... it's hard to be precise, but the release for glibc notes say:-

2.1. Non-constant PTHREAD_STACK_MIN

In order to better support architectures that need a variable stack size for scalable vector registers the constant value for PTHREAD_STACK_MIN has transitioned to a non-constant value e.g. sysconf call.

You may no longer use PTHREAD_STACK_MIN in a way that treats it like a constant value. The value returned for PTHREAD_STACK_MIN is now of type long and so may generate compiler warnings when compared against an unsigned value e.g. size_t.

This will affect a lot of users in about 6 weeks when they start upgrading Ubuntu, but it seems only one other project was affected and they pushed the fix a bit more than 2 months ago.

I checked the dates that Teams on Linux has been updated:-

2020-10-05 22:13:01
2020-12-02 15:58:54
2021-03-09 23:18:50
2021-04-02 02:31:13
2021-06-08 11:55:11

Any chance this means we're overdue an update?
K

Accepted answer

Rudolf Tomori 401 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2021-09-16T09:25:50.713+00:00
Thank you for reporting this issue. As already mentioned in the posts here, the problem is related to glibc 2.34 not being compatible with our implementation. While we look into the issue, we suggest you to use teams from the snapstore. You can install and run it this way:

snap install teams

snap run teams
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Sharon Zhao-MSFT 25,056 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-09-21T13:04:52.657+00:00

@Murray Jones ,

Do you try the solution provided by RudolfTomori-MSFT?

If it works, please accept this reply as answer to benefit more people with the same problem.

Have a nice day!

Murray Jones 51 Reputation points

2021-09-21T23:25:35.8+00:00

Thanks, this does indeed work :). It seems a lot slower to load that the previous .deb was, but that's not really a big deal - might be just my computer.

Sharon Zhao-MSFT 25,056 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-09-22T06:40:29.067+00:00

@Murray Jones ,
It is really good news.
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15 additional answers

Michael N 41 Reputation points

2022-02-21T11:33:12.43+00:00
Edit /usr/bin/teams and modify the line:

nohup "$TEAMS_PATH" "$@" --disable-namespace-sandbox --disable-setuid-sandbox > "$TEAMS_LOGS/teams-startup.log" 2>&1 &

to include the new option --disable-seccomp-filter-sandbox:

nohup "$TEAMS_PATH" "$@" --disable-seccomp-filter-sandbox --disable-namespace-sandbox --disable-setuid-sandbox > "$TEAMS_LOGS/teams-startup.log" 2>&1 &

The latest glibc update broke another layer of sandboxing in the outdated chromium engine that the Teams Preview for Linux uses. Would be nice to have more frequently updated builds ...

By the way: I had to post this answer in Firefox. I tried posting it in Edge for Linux - with zero extensions loaded! - and the learn.microsoft.site refused to accept the post, thinking a CSRF attack was taking place:

Not a good Monday in Microsoft-on-Linux land all around, by the looks of things.
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8 people found this answer helpful.
MD 1 Reputation point

2022-02-25T23:20:37.613+00:00

Worked for me. Been broken all week.
Many thanks!

Arch Linux - updated four days ago (2/21/22).

RACHIT ARORA 1 Reputation point

2022-03-03T09:29:25.073+00:00

You are a goddamn saviour. I published your solution on the Manjaro forum for users having trouble with this problem, if that's okay with you.

Graeme Stewart 1 Reputation point

2022-03-11T12:51:13.757+00:00

Works for me as well on openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Boris 1 Reputation point

2022-03-28T16:47:35.813+00:00

Thanks @Michael N , this solved the exact symptoms listed on this thread.

My 2 cents, I initially added the "--disable-seccomp-filter-sandbox" option after the existing ones and it did not solve the issue. Then I moved it so it would be the first option of the command line (as shown in your post) and it worked... I don't even want to know the reason why the ordering is impacting here, but I'm sure I won't be the only one doing this "mistake" :)

Don Pool 1 Reputation point

2022-04-05T15:12:36.527+00:00

Worked for me too @Fedora 36, thanks!

Trung Do 1 Reputation point

2022-04-06T02:50:59.267+00:00

Thank you. Worked for me on Fedora 36.
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Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-09-13T07:22:37.943+00:00

Honestly this is why I prefer not to rely on Microsoft products... in fact Microsoft is one of the reasons I use Linux... but not to get too bitchy about it... I installed teams yesterday in preparation for the first meeting of the pandemic that wants to use Teams, and not Zoom, or another VC that doesn't have these kinds of issues... and I have precisely the same issue as described above.

While I would like to have a proper solution too... I do have at least a temporary solution for you Murray, so I hope you aren't impacted for your online learning.

In your home folder, inside the hidden folder ".config", teams created 3 folders (why 3, I dread to think)... make sure teams isn't running, delete these three folders and when you start it again, it will ask you to log in as if it had just been installed... and it will work, for 1 session.

The folders are pretty obvious:-
~/.config/teams
~/.config/Microsoft
~/.config/Microsoft Teams - Preview

For anyone else, I have exactly the same symptoms as Murray.... fresh OS install, fresh teams install... works once after install, then after that will not re-load... just opens blank blue box and waits forever.
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1 person found this answer helpful.
Murray Jones 51 Reputation points

2021-09-13T07:34:22.223+00:00

Thanks! This is functional as a workaround, and will at least be adequate for me to attend my lessons :) . Still a pain having to log in every time though, and it takes ages to load for first time start, so I'll leave the question open in case anyone knows a less temporary fix.

Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-09-13T08:24:07.67+00:00

Oh, please do leave the question open... I came here for a fix too!... normally I wouldn't be found anywhere near a Microsoft forum, but sadly my employer has decided to use teams.

Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-09-15T03:21:39.317+00:00

Murray,

I think I'm close to identifying the root cause of this issue can you check on your system in the patch history in /var/lib/apt to see when the last time both teams was updated and when libc 2.34 was installed.,,, and also when you last used it successfully before it stopped working?

I'm pretty sure it's a change to PTHREAD_STACK_MIN in glibc-2.34 that's involved, but I'm not quite sure if the this will impact existing binaries, or just binaries compiled against the new glibc without taking this change into account.

Murray Jones 51 Reputation points

2021-09-15T06:28:53.66+00:00

Teams has never been updated through apt. I originally installed via the .deb package from Microsoft's site a few months ago and have not installed an update for it since.
Last time i successfully used teams was around 2pm on 10th September. Discovered it was not working about 7am on 13th September. I had not attempted to open teams between those two dates.

libc-bin_2.34 was first installed at 23:30pm on 6th September.

Here's my update history as per /var/log/apt/history.log if you want to have a look for yourself: 132178-history.log

Hope that helps :)

Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-09-15T10:58:38.85+00:00

I'm relatively convinced that the issue is related to this change in glibc, https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Release/2.34#Packaging_Changes - specifically "2.1. Non-constant PTHREAD_STACK_MIN". But I'm not sure why this had so little impact, it seems as if the problematic use of PTHREAD_STACK_MIN is deprecated, bad practice or just rare... as the glibc guys didn't seem to give the change a second thought, and it impacted almost nothing else I could find, except the tor-browser.

Installing the teams deb, adds a source, in /etc/apt/sources.list.d... so it's possible that regular updating of the system could update teams, but it seems that the binary we have has not been updated since May... so the only thing I don't understand is why it didn't break for you on the 6th.... clearly it doesn't impact every code path, so perhaps it had to run once (and work)... to update the settings.conf in such a way that the next time it runs it uses the faulty code path... but I don't know how many times you ran it between
"23:30pm on 6th September" and "around 2pm on 10th September"...

I was able to demonstrate that teams fails to create a thread, getting SIGSYS (signal 31), and precisely this specific failure - "Bad system call. #0 clone3 () at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/x86_64/clone3.S:62" - I'm surprised it didn't simply error, perhaps it didn't check that the thread was created successfully?

Is it possible that the 10th was the first time you used it after updating on the 6th?

Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-09-15T15:25:50.1+00:00

This is 100% replicated on a fresh 21.10, it works on a fresh 20.04, and the cause seems certain to be some planned fixes in glibc, which may even have to be backported to 20.04 as the new version has security fixes.... but what with 21.10 being released in ~6 weeks, I hope they can step up and fix this up.

Murray Jones 51 Reputation points

2021-09-15T23:02:17.567+00:00

Good points. I'm not 100% certain, but it is possible that I only ran teams for one session between the 10th and the 6th.
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Grigory Milev 16 Reputation points

2022-02-09T08:43:22.42+00:00

I have same bug on version: teams-1.4.00.26453-1.x86_64
Kernel: 5.16.7
GLibc: glibc-2.35.0.5.249624
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Alexander König 6 Reputation points

2022-02-16T08:49:35.457+00:00

For me Teams stopped working yesterday on Arch Linux 5.16.9-246-tkg-bmq
The teams processes just restartet themselves over and over again. When I deleted the directories "Microsoft" and "Microsoft Teams - Preview" from my .config directory this issue went away and just a white window is now being shown. See screenshot

Even the web version wont work for me on linux with the latest Vivaldi Browser, on Windows 10 it works....

Please fix this quickly.
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Tilman Adler 21 Reputation points

2022-02-16T10:04:35.473+00:00

I have almost the same problem on a quite similar machine. I run teams on an arch linux, which I updated yesterday. This morning teams behaved weird (input field overrode what I typed with old content), then I restarted teams and since then the splash screen is blank and teams doesn't start. During that time no other windows receive keyboard-input (however, alt-tab works? o.O). I removed all three aforementioned folders, rebooted, even reinstalled teams. I also tried setting disableGpu to true in ~/.config/Microsoft/Microsoft Teams/desktop-config.json, but then teams just crashes alltogether. Luckily in my case the web client works.

Tilman Adler 21 Reputation points

2022-02-16T10:12:56.45+00:00

I see errors and crashes in the diagnostic logs, that I can't post here, because of the character limit. Here's an excerpt:

windowIsVisible: false, Window.Status: systray, UserInfo.TimeZone: +01:00, vdiMode: 0, Scenario.Name: desktop_renderer_process_crash, Scenario.Step: stop, Scenario.Status: success, Wed Feb 16 2022 09:55:33 GMT+0100 (Central European Standard Time) <2310> -- error -- Renderer process crashed; rendererName=loadingWindow; crashType=crashed; url=; restarting app=NO

Tilman Adler 21 Reputation points

2022-02-16T10:46:24.937+00:00

One of my colleagues confirmed that teams is broken this way after pacman -Syu this morning (it worked before).

Ridho Pratama 1 Reputation point

2022-02-16T11:57:43.347+00:00

I can confirm this, running Teams on Arch Linux, only purple and window borders when I start the app. After deleting all config files in .config/, now I'm just getting white blank space.

Peter Allebone 1 Reputation point

2022-02-16T13:18:57.757+00:00

I checked both snap and deb versions of teams and its still working on ubuntu so must be something specific to arch. Maybe check with their forums?

Tilman Adler 21 Reputation points

2022-02-16T13:30:24.777+00:00

Right before it stopped working I've upgraded glibc and other people reported this, too: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/teams#comment-852066 unfortunately keeping an outdated package version is not an option for me due to company update policies.

Cris70 1 Reputation point

2022-02-21T08:00:38.117+00:00

Nah, happens here too on openSuse Tumbleweed.
Must be something related to the fact that both Arch and Tumbleweed are bleeding edge.

Michael N 41 Reputation points

2022-02-21T11:44:36.663+00:00

I hit this in openSuse Tumbleweed this morning as well.

Edit /usr/bin/teams and modify the line:

nohup "$TEAMS_PATH" "$@" --disable-namespace-sandbox --disable-setuid-sandbox > "$TEAMS_LOGS/teams-startup.log" 2>&1 &

to include the new option --disable-seccomp-filter-sandbox:

nohup "$TEAMS_PATH" "$@" --disable-seccomp-filter-sandbox --disable-namespace-sandbox --disable-setuid-sandbox > "$TEAMS_LOGS/teams-startup.log" 2>&1 &

The latest glibc update broke another layer of sandboxing in the outdated chromium engine that the Teams Preview for Linux uses. Would be nice to have more frequently updated builds ...
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