You updated your profile picture. Your phone shows the new one. The Outlook desktop on your laptop still shows the old one. Your colleague says she sees the old one too. Teams shows the new one in one chat and the old one in another. You change it again. Nothing happens. You change it back. Still nothing.
This is not a single bug. It is the symptom of a sync chain with four to six caches in series, and any one of them can hold an outdated copy for hours or days. Microsoft’s official guidance — “it may take 24 to 48 hours” — is technically correct and practically useless when you have a presentation tomorrow morning and want your face to be current.
This is the actual map of where your photo lives, the order in which the caches update, and the cache-by-cache fix that works.
The propagation chain you’re fighting
When you upload a new profile photo on a Microsoft 365 work or school account, the photo is written to one place: the root of your Exchange Online mailbox. From there, it has to travel.
The path looks like this:
- Exchange Online mailbox receives the new photo. This is the source of truth.
- SharePoint Online pulls the photo and generates three thumbnails (small, medium, large) on the My Site Host. This can take up to 72 hours, and it doesn’t happen until you (or a service) visit the About Me page.
- The Global Address List (GAL) picks up the new photo for the address book.
- Each Outlook client downloads the Offline Address Book (OAB), which is updated on a schedule — typically every 24 hours but configurable per tenant.
- Teams maintains its own local image cache, separate from Outlook’s.
- Each recipient’s Outlook or Teams caches the image when they first see it from you, and holds that cached copy for an unspecified period.
Each of those caches is independently stale. The photo can be perfectly current in step 1 and outdated in steps 2 through 6 simultaneously. When recipients tell you they see the old photo and you see the new one, you are looking at different points in the chain.
The first thing to internalise: this is normal. Microsoft built a system in which it is genuinely possible for an authoritative photo update to take 24 to 72 hours to propagate everywhere it needs to go. If you changed your photo less than two hours ago and it hasn’t fully propagated, the right answer is to wait. Past that window, you start attacking caches.
Where to update the photo (and where not to)
Most propagation problems start before any sync issue, because the photo was updated in the wrong place.
For a Microsoft 365 work or school account, update at one of these two locations:
- office.com → click your photo top-right → My Microsoft 365 profile → change the photo. This writes to your Exchange Online mailbox correctly.
- Outlook on the Web (OWA) → click your photo top-right → My profile → upload. Same outcome.
For a personal Microsoft account (outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com), update at account.microsoft.com → Your info → change picture.
What people frequently do instead, and shouldn’t:
- Updating the photo in the desktop Outlook File > Office Account screen. This sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t, and on outlook.com personal accounts it frequently silently fails.
- Updating the photo in Teams. This used to write back to the Microsoft 365 profile reliably. Since the new Teams client rollout, the path is more fragile. For business accounts, do it in OWA or office.com and let Teams sync from there.
- Updating the photo by editing your contact card. This changes how you appear to yourself in your own contacts, not your global identity. Don’t.
If you have multiple Microsoft accounts signed in across Office apps, this is the moment to check that you updated the photo on the right account. The “old photo” you keep seeing might be the correct photo for the account that’s actually active in the app.
Cache by cache: the fix order
Once you’ve waited a reasonable propagation window and the photo is still not updating, work down this list in order.
Your own Outlook desktop client. Close Outlook completely. Press Windows + R, type outlook.exe /cleanprofile, press Enter. This forces Outlook to discard certain cached profile elements on next start. Open Outlook and check. If that doesn’t do it, navigate to %localappdata%\Microsoft\Outlook\Offline Address Books\ and delete the folder contents (Outlook will recreate it). Reopen Outlook, go to Send/Receive > Send/Receive Groups > Download Address Book, and force a fresh download.
Your Teams client. Quit Teams entirely — right-click the taskbar icon and choose Quit, not just close the window. Navigate to %userprofile%\appdata\local\Packages\MSTeams_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Microsoft\MSTeams\ and delete the cache files inside. Restart Teams and sign back in. This forces Teams to refetch your photo from the profile service.
Your browser, for OWA. OWA caches your photo aggressively in the browser cache. A hard refresh (Ctrl+F5) isn’t always enough; clear the browser’s cached images and files for office.com and outlook.office.com specifically.
The Offline Address Book on the Exchange side. This is the IT admin’s job, not yours, but it’s worth knowing it exists. The OAB is regenerated on a schedule — typically once every 24 hours. A tenant admin can force an OAB regeneration in Exchange Online PowerShell with Update-OfflineAddressBook. After regeneration, each Outlook client downloads the new OAB on its next 24-hour cycle, or sooner if you force the download from the client.
SharePoint thumbnails. If your photo updates in Outlook but not in SharePoint, Yammer, or Microsoft 365 group spaces, the SharePoint thumbnails haven’t regenerated yet. Visit https://[yourtenant]-my.sharepoint.com and navigate to your own About Me / Profile page. The act of viewing it triggers thumbnail regeneration. Then wait up to a few hours.
The recipient’s cache. This is the one you can’t fix. If your colleague’s Outlook is still showing your old photo days after everyone else’s has updated, the only reliable fix is for them to clear their own Outlook OAB or their Teams cache. You can’t reach into their machine and force it.
The hybrid Exchange complication
If your organisation runs hybrid Exchange — some mailboxes on-premises, some in Exchange Online, with directory sync via Azure AD Connect — there is an additional failure mode.
Historically, on-premises Active Directory stored profile photos in the thumbnailPhoto attribute. Modern Microsoft 365 stores the authoritative photo in the Exchange Online mailbox. Azure AD Connect can be configured to sync thumbnailPhoto from on-prem AD into the cloud, but that sync can fight with the Exchange Online photo: a user updates their photo via OWA, the cloud has the new photo, then Azure AD Connect runs and overwrites it with the (older) thumbnailPhoto value from on-prem AD.
If your organisation is hybrid and photo updates keep “reverting” after a few hours, this is almost certainly what’s happening. The fix is on the IT side: stop syncing thumbnailPhoto from on-prem AD, set photos in the cloud only, and let Exchange Online be the authoritative source. End users can’t fix this themselves; report it to IT with the symptom “my photo reverts to an old version after I update it.”
Why recipients see different photos from each other
This is the most disorienting part of the problem, and the answer is mundane: each recipient’s client has independently cached your photo at a different moment, and each one will refresh on its own schedule. There is no central authority pushing your new photo to every Outlook in the world. Your colleague who started using Outlook this morning will fetch your current photo. Your colleague who has had Outlook open for three weeks will be using a cached version from three weeks ago.
If you are switching photos for a specific reason — a new headshot for a presentation, a corporate rebrand, an event — accept that the rollout will be uneven for a few days. The clean alternative, when it matters, is to use the photo in an email signature image instead. That image is sent with every message, isn’t cached the same way, and will display consistently to the recipient.
For business email signatures specifically, where the goal is consistent visual identity across every send, the signature-as-image approach has its own pitfalls — but it is the approach you actually control, rather than the one that depends on six caches you don’t.
And if you’re using the new Outlook for Windows, profile photo handling is one of the many image-related behaviours that differ from Classic Outlook, so worth checking which client your recipients are seeing you in before assuming the cache is the issue.