How to fix a Teams team with no Owners?

Time needed: 10 minutes

How to add a new Owner to a Microsoft Teams team using PowerShell

1. Open Powershell (don’t use SharePoint Online Management Shell)

   At least I had to run it as an admin. Don’t use SharePoint Online Management Shell – you never know if some of the imported commandlet names might conflict!

2. Store your credentials

   $cred = Get-Credential
   
   This opens a login window, where you can give your admin credentials.

3. Establish a session with Exchange Online

   $session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
   
   The ConnectionUri is the same for all tenants! Don’t change it.
   Then import the established session:
   
   Import-PSSession $session
   
   Executing this command should actually take a while, as PowerShell is importing a lot of commandlets here. After it’s done, you are able to run the next command. If you aren’t, you’ll need to make sure you have enough permissions on the account you’re using!
   

4. Figure out the alias of your group (you’ll need it in a sec)

   Running something like this gets you only the “orphaned” groups (without a single owner). Exchange Online calls Office Groups UnifiedGroups. That might be a bit confusing, but it’s very fitting for their role as the one, unifying the access to all different Microsoft tools in Office 365!
   
   $Groups = Get-UnifiedGroup | Where-Object {([array](Get-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity $_.Id -LinkType Owners)).Count -eq 0} | Select Id, Alias, DisplayName, ManagedBy, WhenCreated
   
   ForEach ($G in $Groups) {
   Write-Host “Warning! The following group has no owner:” $G.Alias
   }
   
   
   
   This magic command shows only the Office 365 Groups without Owners. In this case, there’s just one, and its properties are shown nicely.
5. Add your account (or any other) as a member of the group, then as the owner

   This order of commands is required – only members can also be owners! See the commands below – they’ll yield no output if successful:
   
   Add-UnifiedGroupLinks [alias_from_above] -Links [your_upn] -LinkType Member
Add-UnifiedGroupLinks [alias_from_above] -Links [your_upn] -LinkType Owner


6. Verify, that the operation was successful

   You can verify the success by querying for your group:
   
   Get-UnifiedGroup -Identity [alias_again] | Select Alias,ManagedBy

   This should produce your group with your account in the “ManagedBy” column.
   
   Alternatively, of course, you can just query all orphaned groups again!