Reactivate deleted Microsoft 365 Development Tenant

Andrew Connell covered in “On what you need to know – Microsoft 365 Developer Program changes in 2024”. In detail, he explains what we know about the future of free tenants. My main free development tenant got deleted as well. This problem hit me after my holiday because Microsoft decommissioned the development tenant I started to use in 2019. Over the years, it has always renewed, but not this time.

I was so used to the URL of my tenant, so I wanted to keep the tenant name the same. Sadly, I couldn’t create a new tenant with that same name. So I asked myself, was the tenant deleted?

What does tenant deletion mean under Microsoft Terms

Microsoft deletes all your data in your tenant. It also decommissions all services attached to the tenant. I assumed everything got deleted.

My first thought was, let’s get a regular paid Microsoft 365 subscription using the same name. The problem I faced was that I could not choose the same name for my tenant. It should have been possible if everything had been deleted.

I headed to the developer program, and my “current” and past tenants were still listed there.

The link for the subscription was greyed out, so it must have been deleted. The short answer is no; it still is there.

Login to my old tenant

I tried to log in to the admin portal via admin.microsoft.com. The tenant admin password still worked — even though all the sample users were there.

I tried to access other services, and those haven’t worked anymore. Microsoft deleted, for example, SharePoint, Exchange and many more things. The Entra ID partitions and all the Microsoft 365 configurations were not deleted.

This fact explains why I could not create a new tenant with the same name, and parts of Microsoft 365 are still in business.

Restore the development tenant

With SharePoint and Exchange service gone, I haven’t much hope of reenabling the tenant again.

The first thing I did was to enter my billing information in the tenant. It worked perfectly fine.

The second step was to buy an Office 365 E3 developer license for my one and only user on the tenant. Once I had finished this, I was waiting for the other services to return.

About half an hour later, the old developer tenant landing page returned fully functioning. I switched it to a communication site, and could work and test again.

So far, I haven’t recognised any issues after working with my “new” tenant under the same name.

What else has been restored?

I now have an empty list of SharePoint sites, which saves me the headache of cleaning up the grown mess over the years.

I was surprised when I accessed the SharePoint overview page. It listed all the “Frequent Sites” there. Of course, they all have been deleted and returned a 404 not found error, but Microsoft 365 still was aware of those sites.

What did not delete my Microsoft?

OneDrive still had all the old files, which was a surprise. One would have assumed this would have been deleted with SharePoint.

Power Automate has not been deleted from your tenant, which is good in case you haven’t had some exports of your flow.

The connections attached to the flows are dead, and I need to reconfigure them, but in general, they will start work again.

The same goes with my Power Apps; they remained untouched, and I could edit those.

I could not access my emails before I got a valid license. I could access my mailbox again, and all the emails were there.

The emails were unexpected and came as a surprise. When Microsoft means all your data will be deleted, it only means your SharePoint data. Unless I have misread the emails I got.

Could I even restore the oldest Microsoft 365 development tenant? I am not sure about that, and I have already wiped all the passwords from that tenant.

Verdict

The Microsoft 365 developer program only deletes all the information from SharePoint but none of the connected services. For example, if you had an important Power Automate Flow, you used to play around. Or a fancy Power App you used for a blog post a while back.

All that information still exists and can be reactivated by putting in some small coins for Microsoft.

Something for free is always nice. From a business perspective, the 72$ annual expense is a little. I spend way more money on other software subscriptions to be able to work.

I love that I restored the URL I used for SharePoint and my tenant, which was more important for me. Plus, the bonus-connected services I used before, such as Power Automate and Power Apps, were still working.

After the first debacle, when my tenant got deleted, and I couldn’t reuse the same URL again, I started already to number the development tenants. Seems like I could stay with the very first number now and in future.

In my case, the deletion and the reactivation were timely close together with just two weeks in between. It could be that additional data will get deleted in future if not restored.