How to clear Teams cache with PowerShell

Clearing Teams cache is one of the first steps in troubleshooting client-side issues with Microsoft Teams. Very often it's the one and only step.

In this article I'm presenting a code snippet to automate this process. The code might then be used as a self-service activity. What do you think - how many tickets would be immediately solved if your users had such a tool?

Tip

Update December 2023 - the article now covers both new Teams and classic Teams application

The manual way and its issue

Microsoft provides a dedicated article on how to Clear Teams cache.

The solution presented in the article is absolutely correct. It clears all of the temporary files and forces Teams to recreate them.

For me this solutions come with the issues:

• Most important to me, user-uploaded background images are lost
• It's not easy to memorize which path to empty. Every time you need to reset your Teams, you need to search it using you favorite search engine

The solution for above is to have a script doing it instead.

There's one more thing to be aware of. Some of our client-side settings will still be lost. Example of these setting is the preview mode - we need to opt-in for it manually. So far I haven't found a way to cover these settings in the script.

The script for new Teams

The lines below will remove all the temporary files for new Teams client. It will, however, leave the Backgrounds folder intact.

The script also stops the Teams process on the machine. Once the cleanup is done, it starts it once again.

$proc = Get-Process 'ms-teams' -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$cacheFolderPath = "$($env:LOCALAPPDATA)\Packages\MSTeams_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Microsoft\MSTeams"
$proc | Stop-Process
$cacheItems = Get-ChildItem $cacheFolderPath -Exclude 'Backgrounds'
$cacheItems | Remove-Item -Recurse -Force
$teamsAppId = 'MSTeams_8wekyb3d8bbwe!MSTeams'
$startProcessArgs = @{
  FilePath = 'explorer.exe'
  ArgumentList = "shell:AppsFolder\$teamsAppId"
}
Start-Process  @startProcessArgs

The differences between the script for new and classic Teams are:

• Different process name (was teams, is ms-teams)
• Different folder for storing cache
• Different way to start the app - previously we started the executable, now we need to start the Universal Windows App (UWP).

The script for classic Teams

The lines below will remove all the temporary files from the %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams. It will, however, leave the Backgrounds folder intact.

The script also stops the Teams process on the machine. Once the cleanup is done, it starts it once again.

$proc = Get-Process 'Teams' -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$cacheFolderPath = "$($env:APPDATA)\Microsoft\Teams"
$proc | Stop-Process
$cacheItems = Get-ChildItem $cacheFolderPath -Exclude 'Backgrounds'
$cacheItems | Remove-Item -Recurse -Force
$startProcessArgs = @{
  FilePath = "$($env:LOCALAPPDATA)\Microsoft\Teams\Update.exe"
  ArgumentList = '--processStart "Teams.exe"'
}
Start-Process  @startProcessArgs

Distributing the script

Now when we have our script, what's next. If we want people to use it without calling support, we can package the script and push it to the machines.

For packaging the script, feel free to check ATA and Friends' guide The De Facto Guide for Converting a PS1 to EXE (7 Ways). There are other ways but covering them would be an extensive topic.

Summary

In this article we created a script to clear Microsoft Teams cache.

Do you find it useful? Would you like to read more about distributing the script to the machines? Or perhaps the article is missing something?

Let me know in the comments!