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Private Chat Options Disappear When Participant Joins Meeting

Forum|Forum|7 months ago
June 9, 2025
9 replies
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Hi Zoom Community,

Wondering if anyone else is running into this glitch.

Today (06.09.25), I noticed that my chat options changed unexpectedly during a Zoom session. Behind the scenes, all of my meeting settings allow participants to chat publicly and privately (host only, everyone, and individual participants). However, as soon as someone else joined my meeting, the private chat options disappeared. The only option available was to chat with everyone.

I double-checked my Zoom settings—everything is enabled to allow full chat functionality. To troubleshoot, I set up a test session and had someone join. As soon as they entered the room, the same thing happened: chat instantly defaulted to “Everyone” only, and all private chat options were removed.

Private messaging is a key part of how I facilitate training sessions, so this is a major disruption.

Is anyone else experiencing this issue? Would love to know if there’s a fix or if this is a known bug.

Thanks in advance,
Lenore

Meeting Features

Best answer by MGSR

Hi @DexterCool! It’s been added to the June 4th release notes—you can check it out at this link.

D

DexterCool

Newcomer

Yes this happened / is happening to me too as HOST. Only public chats available. (Plus I cannot annotate other people's shared presentations). Fix needed ASAP.

L

Leilaure

Newcomer

Yes, same here, I cannot chat with my participants directly. This is a huge issue.

L

LAbareAuthor

Newcomer

Thanks for jumping in here! I hope someone with a solution sees this convo and saves the day. Fingers crossed!

A

alampkin

Newcomer

Hi there! I noticed an issue on my Zoom today too - for me, it appears that Zoom has changed how you private message people and it's no longer a drop down. When I open my chat, I now have to click the blue icon on the top left with the pencil, and then can message someone directly. Hope that helps!

P

pmassey

Newcomer

Even though I was able to figure out how to private message — I’m unable to see my private messages as a host or cohost. This is such a pain.
I can’t imagine that zoom has NOT provided easy to find guides on how to use the chat with these awful changes c

MGSR

Community Manager

Hello community members,

We're sorry for the confusion.
If you click on the blue pen on the top left of the chat, you will have an option to send a message to the main chat and new chat where you can send a private message by searching the name of the attendee you want to send a private message to.

Let us know if this helps or if you need further assistance.

D

DexterCool

Newcomer

I'm genuinely curious - when and how did you let users know about this? How did I miss this?

D

DexterCool

Newcomer

Thank you Mark for jumping in here with the clarification. I've been able to successfully use the new chat setup. Thanks again for continuing to improve a tool central to so many of our businesses! Have a great weekend. Thanks Everyone else for chiming in too!

Thanks ChatGPT!

S

sparklingsoul

Newcomer

So glad you wrote this. I was getting paranoid because I joined 3 Zoom meetings from 3 different organizations this week, and all of them had private chat disabled (and normally they don't). Zoom must have made some change.

T

treelight

Newcomer

I tried this new way with the blue pencil. It is cumbersome and very distracting from the call. And... when I try to send the message to my "New Chat" it won't send. Why fix what ain't broke? Especially with something that doesn't work. Kindly clarify.

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djones1

Newcomer

Not a fan of this update either. I am in a unique situation as I am holding classes daily for a large number of people. I have it set up where the participants can only chat either me the host or a cohost privately. Now, I am missing private chats, as a participant will send a chat to me, but it won't notify me that a chat was sent. I will have to manually cycle through the participants to see if a private chat was sent to me. It's very easy to miss a chat from a trainee. Is there a way to turn on private chat notifications with this update?

D

DexterCool

Newcomer

I've noted another issue. When chatting to one individual and then wanting to chat to another it is very easy to mistakenly add this second person to the first person to make a group chat (which I didn't want) leading to messages meant for one person to go to both! Embarrassing. It was fine the way it was - you did pilot/test all of these changes before greenlighting them, right? Right??