restoring accidentally deleted teams messages

Hi @Hunt, Virginia

Regarding your issue, once a Teams message is deleted, it cannot be recovered directly by users. Teams does offer a brief "Undo" option that appears right after a message is deleted, but once that disappears, the deletion is permanent from the chat. 

Recovery may still be possible, but only through your organization’s admin: 

• If your tenant has retention policies or litigation hold enabled, deleted messages may still be preserved in the background for compliance purposes: Security and compliance in Microsoft Teams
• An admin can then use eDiscovery (Content Search) in Microsoft Purview to search and retrieve those messages: Find and delete Microsoft Teams chat messages in eDiscovery

I would recommend reaching out to your IT admin as soon as possible and providing them with the chat or channel name, the participants involved, and the approximate date and time of the deleted messages. They can then check whether recovery is possible through eDiscovery. 

If no retention policy or hold exists, the messages are likely permanently deleted.  

Hopefully it clears thing up and if you have any other questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask.       

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Deleted Teams chat or group chat messages cannot be restored by end users or admins once they are deleted in the client. There is no recycle bin or restore option for regular Teams chat messages.

If messages were deleted as part of a compliance/eDiscovery purge, the user copy is removed immediately and is not recoverable for the user. A compliance copy may exist temporarily in the background (for retention/eDiscovery purposes), but it is not something that can be restored back into Teams for normal use.

If the important information was stored in shared files rather than in the text of the messages, those files might still be recoverable from SharePoint/OneDrive recycle bins, depending on where they were stored and how they were deleted.

References:

• Find and delete Microsoft Teams chat messages in eDiscovery