Your Teams recording split because Microsoft caps a single recording at "4 hours or 1.5 GB" — and when that ceiling is reached, in Microsoft's own words, "the recording ends and automatically restarts." Two files is documented behaviour, not a failed upload and not a corrupted export.
The reason this catches people out is that the two Microsoft pages describing it don't describe it the same way. One gives you both ceilings; the other mentions only time, and frames the whole thing as something that happens when a participant forgets to leave.
What Microsoft actually documents
The admin-facing limits page lists "Meeting recording maximum length" with the value "4 hours or 1.5 GB", followed by: "When this limit is reached, the recording ends and automatically restarts."
Two details in that sentence do most of the work:
- It is "or", not "and". Either ceiling on its own triggers the cut. A 90-minute meeting that produces a large file gets split just as surely as a five-hour one.
- "ends and automatically restarts" — Teams does not stop capturing. It closes the current file and opens a new one, which is why you end up with a set of sequential recordings rather than a truncated meeting.
The meeting itself is governed by a separate number. The same page notes: "Microsoft Teams meetings and events (such as webinars and town halls) have a time limit of 30 hours." So the call can comfortably outlive any single recording file.
Which ceiling hits first: usually size
Microsoft publishes exactly one figure for how big a recording gets, in its storage planning guidance: "The size of a one-hour recording is 400 MB."
Run that against the 1.5 GB ceiling and you reach it at roughly three and three-quarter hours — before the four-hour clock. So if your meeting ran under four hours and still split, the size ceiling is the one to look at.
Two caveats worth keeping. Microsoft states the 400 MB figure flatly, without saying what resolution, frame rate or bitrate it assumes, and without saying whether it is an average or a ceiling — so treat it as a planning estimate, not a prediction for your specific recording. And if you have seen 1.37 GB quoted as the split point in forum threads, that is a community figure; the number in Microsoft's limits table is 1.5 GB.
The end-user page tells a different story
Here is the information gap that sends people searching. Microsoft's support article for end users, Start, stop, and find meeting recordings in Microsoft Teams, says this under the question of who can start or stop a recording:
"The recording stops automatically once everyone leaves the meeting. If someone forgets to leave, the recording will end and automatically restart every four hours until the last participant leaves the meeting."
Compare that with the limits page and three differences stand out:
- No size ceiling. The 1.5 GB half of the rule is absent here entirely.
- A different framing. The split is presented as a consequence of someone forgetting to leave, rather than as the standard behaviour for any long or large recording.
- "Every four hours" — phrased as a repeating cycle, which is consistent with the limits page but only covers the time half of it.
The same page also notes: "Recording continues even if the person who started the recording leaves the meeting." That is worth knowing if you walked out of an all-day call and came back to more files than you expected.
Practical rule: plan against the limits page, not the support page. Assume a cut at 1.5 GB or four hours, whichever arrives first.
Where the second file was saved
Both segments land wherever that meeting type normally stores recordings — which is not the same place for every meeting:
| Meeting type | Where the files go |
|---|---|
| Private meeting or event | The organizer's OneDrive Recordings folder, "even if the organizer didn't attend the meeting or event" |
| Channel meeting | The channel's SharePoint site, in a folder named Recordings |
| 1:1 and group calls | "the OneDrive account of the user who selected Record" |
For non-channel meetings, Microsoft's troubleshooting page puts it plainly: "For non-channel meetings, the recording is stored in the Recordings folder under My files." Each file is an .mp4 — that is the only place Microsoft states the extension, in the steps for playing a channel recording.
What to do with two files
There is no reassembly step to run inside Teams. The realistic options are to share both files as they are, or to shrink them first — and if the audience is outside your organization, Microsoft itself points toward the second option: "External sharing isn't designed for the distribution of large files or a large number of files."
Two recording segments is precisely "a large number of large files". Compressing each one before it goes anywhere is the cheapest fix, and it also gets each file under the caps of whatever chat tool you forward it through.
Try it right here
Runs in your browser. Your file is not uploaded anywhere.
This runs entirely in your browser tab — the recording is read from disk, re-encoded locally, and handed back. Nothing is uploaded, which matters when the file is an internal meeting. For finer control over resolution and bitrate, use the full video compressor, or see how to compress a video without losing quality for what the settings actually trade away.
Captions and transcripts across the split
This is where a split recording causes real, avoidable damage.
The transcript is a separate file stored next to the video: "The captions and transcript file is stored with the video in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint." Microsoft also warns that you will not see it in the folder listing — "There is no direct access to see or manage the captions and transcript file in the file explorer for OneDrive for Business or SharePoint." So a Recordings folder showing only two .mp4 files does not mean the transcripts are missing.
Two things will break that link, and both are the kind of tidying-up people do after a split:
- "The transcription link remains for the lifetime of the file in most cases, but can be broken if the video file is copied within the same OneDrive or SharePoint site."
- "Closed captions aren't fully supported if the Teams meeting recording is moved or copied from its original location in OneDrive or SharePoint."
Leave both segments where Teams put them. If you need the text elsewhere, download it instead: organizers and co-organizers can download a transcript "as a .docx or .vtt file". If your editing tool wants SubRip rather than WebVTT, convert it with VTT to SRT rather than renaming the extension.
And if a segment plays with no caption option at all, Microsoft gives the reason directly: "If recording is turned on, but transcription is turned off, the recording doesn't have a transcript file stored next to it."
How to confirm nothing is missing
Open the Recordings folder — not the meeting chat — and check that the segments are consecutive. If one is genuinely absent, Microsoft's checklist is: "If you know the recording was started but can't find it in OneDrive, check if it was deleted, moved to a different location, or expired. Look in your recycle bin and second stage recycle bin."
FAQ
Why did my Teams recording split into two files? It hit one of the two ceilings on Microsoft's limits page: four hours of length, or 1.5 GB of file size. Either one alone ends the current recording and starts a new one automatically.
Can I stop Teams from splitting long recordings? Microsoft's limits page describes the split as what happens when the ceiling is reached; it does not describe a setting for changing it. If you need a different arrangement for a long event, check the official documentation or ask your IT admin.
Does the split happen at 1.37 GB? The figure published in Microsoft's limits table is 1.5 GB, alongside the four-hour length. Plan against 1.5 GB, with headroom, rather than a number from a forum thread.
Do I get a separate transcript for each file?
The transcript file is stored with the video and is not visible in the OneDrive or SharePoint file listing, so you cannot confirm it by looking at the folder. Open each segment in the player to check, and download what you need as .docx or .vtt.
Why can't a colleague download both files? Microsoft's pages give different answers here. One support page says "Only the meeting organizer can download the meeting recording", while its own permissions table lists download as available to any "User with view permission", and the admin documentation says other members from the organizer's organization "have read access, but no sharing and download permissions". Ask the organizer to share the files explicitly rather than guessing which rule applies to your tenant.
More Teams and meeting-recording troubleshooting lives in the fix guides, and the browser-side tools — compression, format conversion, subtitle conversion — are all listed under Clapr tools.
Figures cited from Microsoft's Teams limits and specifications, recording storage, and support documentation, checked 16 September 2026. Microsoft revises these pages; verify against the official documentation before relying on a number.
