Almost always it is permission rather than a fault. Recording in Teams depends on your licence, your role in that specific meeting, and a policy your administrator sets. If any one of those says no, the button is there but disabled.
Restarting Teams will not fix it, and neither will reinstalling. Work through the causes below instead, roughly in order of how often each one turns out to be the answer.
You are an external guest. If you were invited from outside the organization that owns the meeting, you generally cannot record it, regardless of what your own account can do elsewhere. This is the single most common answer and there is no setting on your end that changes it.
Your administrator turned it off. Recording is governed by a meeting policy applied to your account. Plenty of organizations disable it by default, or allow it only for certain groups. If a colleague can record and you cannot, this is almost certainly why.
Your licence does not include it. Recording is not part of every Teams plan. If your organization is on a plan without it, the option is visible but never usable.
You are not the organizer, and the organizer's settings do not allow it. Who can record is partly controlled per meeting. Recording a Teams meeting when you are not the organizer goes through what each role is allowed to do.
Storage or a technical block. Less common, but recording writes to OneDrive or SharePoint, so if that storage is full or unavailable the option can stop working. Your administrator can see this and you generally cannot.
Ask the organizer to start the recording, if the point is simply that the meeting gets recorded. This solves it more often than anything technical.
Compare with a colleague on the same call. If theirs works and yours does not, it is your account, which means a policy or licence question for your IT team. If nobody's works, it is the meeting or the organization.
Then ask your administrator directly, and be specific: ask whether recording is enabled in the meeting policy applied to your account, and whether your licence includes it. Those two questions get a real answer faster than a general support ticket.
Sometimes it is. Your organization has decided that people in your position do not record meetings, and that decision is not going to be reversed for one call.
Worth saying plainly: if recording has been turned off deliberately for a meeting you are in, that is a decision to respect rather than route around. Recording other people is something you should be open about in any case.
Where it is your own call and the block is a licence or a guest-status quirk rather than a policy about consent, recording from your own computer sidesteps the Teams permission system entirely, because it is not using it.
Jotted records what is on your screen rather than joining the meeting, so there is no role check and no licence check, and the file lands on your own disk. It reminds you to tell people you are recording before it starts, which is the part that matters more than the mechanics. What the law asks of you depends on where you and the other people are sitting, and that does not change just because the tool changed.
Because something is withholding permission rather than because anything is broken. The usual causes are being an external guest, an administrator policy that disables recording for your account, a licence that does not include it, or the organizer's settings for that meeting.
Generally no. If you were invited from outside the organization that owns the meeting, recording is normally unavailable to you no matter what your own account allows elsewhere.
No. The record option is disabled by policy, licence or role, and reinstalling the app does not change any of those.
That points at your account rather than the meeting. It is usually a meeting policy applied to you, or a difference in licence, and your administrator can confirm which.
Ask two specific questions: whether recording is enabled in the meeting policy applied to your account, and whether your licence includes meeting recording. Those get a straight answer faster than a general ticket.
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