Migrated message reactions do not appear in the UI

Question

Migrated message reactions do not appear in the UI

L 40

I am testing the possibility of importing messages from another platform into Teams. I have been following the procedures described here.

I can send a channel message in migration mode including a reactions array:

{
  "createdDateTime": "2021-01-01T23:30:00.000Z",
  "from": {
    "user": {
      "id": "3b4d1d7f-b7d9-4d5d-b084-90e3cd23e71b",
      "displayName": "Example User 1",
      "userIdentityType": "aadUser"
    }
  },
  "body": {
    "contentType": "html",
    "content": "<p>Test message to react to.</p>"
  },
  "reactions": [
    {
      "createdDateTime": "2021-01-01T23:31:00.000Z",
      "displayName": "Surprised",
      "reactionType": "😮",
      "user": {
        "user": {
          "id": "89e05574-49ba-47b1-82d1-ea213a37ef58",
          "displayName": "Example User 2",
          "userIdentityType": "aadUser"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

The message is created successfully, and it appears in the UI, but without any reactions displayed.

However, if I manually add any new reaction through the UI, the reactions added through the API then appear.

Is this a known issue?

Sayali-MSFT 5,191 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-02-20T08:59:44.64+00:00

Hello @L, Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. We will look into it and get back to you shortly.

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Sayali-MSFT 5,191 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-02-20T08:59:44.64+00:00

Hello @L, Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. We will look into it and get back to you shortly.

Answer 1

Sayali-MSFT 5,191 Microsoft External Staff Moderator

Hello L,
Reactions included in migrated messages are accepted by the API but are not rendered in the Teams UI until a “live” reaction is added later.

This is by design / limitation of the Teams migration pipeline.

L 40 Reputation points

2026-02-24T02:08:42.3233333+00:00

Hi @Sayali-MSFT and @Matthew-P ,

Thanks for taking the time to investigate and explain the technical limitations.

Would it be possible to add a task to the development pipeline to resolve this please?

Reactions are often an important part of the context surrounding a message (e.g. an acknowledgement of the message, or an indication of pending action), and it's very unlikely that new reactions would be added to most of our migrated messages, so the majority of imported reactions will currently remain permanently invisible.
Matthew-P 11,570 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-02-25T02:52:40.56+00:00
Hi L,Thank you for your response. I completely agree with your point regarding the importance of reactions as context markers (acknowledgments, pending actions), especially for historical data where new interactions are unlikely to occur.

As a forum moderator, my primary role is to assist with technical investigations and guidance based on the current platform capabilities. Since this behavior involves the underlying rendering logic of the Teams client during migration, it would require a review by the Product Engineering team for a potential code adjustment.

To ensure this specific scenario is brought to their attention and prioritized, I highly suggest submitting a formal report through the official Microsoft Feedback Portal and the GitHub Community Discussions:

Microsoft Feedback Portal

GitHub Community Discussions

Raising it directly in these channels allows the development team to track the impact of this behavior on migration workflows like yours and consider including a fix in the upcoming development pipeline.

Thank you for your understanding and for helping us improve the migration experience.
L 40 Reputation points

2026-02-25T05:46:22.57+00:00

Thanks @Matthew-P , I've made a Feedback post for this.

Answer 2

Hi L,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Forum! Have a good day and I hope you're doing well!

I completely understand the confusion here. Since the reactions appear after a manual interaction, it confirms that your migration logic is correct and the data is safely stored in the backend which is the most important part. However, the user experience is definitely not ideal.

I am currently in the process of reproducing your exact scenario using the Microsoft Graph API in Migration Mode to isolate the behavior.

While I finalize my test environment, here are some key insights based on your description:

Data Integrity vs. UI Rendering: This confirms that the issue is strictly a Client-side UI rendering issue (likely a caching or hydration bug), not a data loss issue. The Teams client seems to fail to "paint" the reaction layer for backdated messages upon initial load.
Trigger Mechanism: When you manually add a reaction, you force the client to fetch the latest state of the message object from the server. This "force refresh" inadvertently retrieves and displays the hidden historical reactions.
Migration Mode Constraints: Messages imported in "Migration Mode" often bypass certain real-time signal pipelines that normally notify the UI to update. This might be why the UI doesn't know it needs to display the reaction icons until interacted with.

I will update you shortly with the results from my reproduction tests and any potential workarounds I find.

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Matthew-P 11,570 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-02-23T02:40:13.6233333+00:00

Hi L,

I hope you're doing well!

Due to some current restrictions within our test tenant's migration mode environment, I have not been able to fully reproduce the visual aspect of the issue in my lab yet. However, based on the behavior you described and the architectural nature of the Migration API, I can share a technical hypothesis regarding why this is happening.

When you import messages using the Teams migration API (POST /teams/{team-id}/channels/{channel-id}/messages in migration mode), reactions included in the request body are successfully written to the backend storage. However, they are not rendered in the Teams UI immediately because the client relies on real-time signals to update the view, which are often bypassed during bulk migration import.

The Teams client caches message metadata aggressively. Since the migration flow writes directly to the message store without triggering the standard notification layer, the client-side rendering pipeline doesn't "know" it needs to display these reactions. Manually adding a new reaction forces the client to re-fetch and re-render the message's entire metadata from the server, which is why the originally imported reactions suddenly appear.

Please note that while there is no explicit Microsoft documentation confirming this as a known limitation, this behavior strongly suggests a functional gap or a logic mismatch between the Migration API's write process and the Teams Client's read/caching mechanism, rather than a data loss issue.

The core functionality remains intact (data is preserved), but the UI synchronization requires an interaction trigger to display correctly.

I will continue to monitor this and update you if I find any official workarounds.

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Migrated message reactions do not appear in the UI

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