Article overview

Hello and thank you for reading my first post!

I have put this post together to outline some additional steps that I had to recently complete to successfully delete an Azure / Entra ID tenant. This situation arose following an acquisition which meant the tenant in question was redundant after the existing resources were migrated.

I personally found that the additional steps required, were not mentioned in Microsoft Learn articles at the time, which under normal circumstances would successfully guide you through the deletion process successfully.

For reference, one of the resources I am referring to can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/users/directory-delete-howto.

Microsoft Entra ID tenant deletion prerequisites

Before being able to proceed to delete an Entra tenant, you will need to complete (as outlined in the above guide) all of the pre-requisites, once complete they should all have a green status as shown in the below screenshot:

This status page is available in the Entra Admin Centre (entra.microsoft.com).

To note, for the License-based subscriptions status to pass, it took around 120 days, this was due to the licenses in my tenant being provided by a third-party reseller. Please note, licenses provided by a reseller take longer to move through each stage of decommissioning, before being removed from the tenant. This lengthy license decommissioning process essentially acts as a back stop, allowing plenty of time before any data is purged for the licenses to be re-added if needed, and in turn recovering the licensed features and data in an event of any licenses being removed by mistake.

The blocker: Legacy Microsoft Partnerships

However, although the pre-requisites passed as shown above, I still could not delete the tenant in question. I kept receiving the below error suggesting it was due to left-over Enterprise Applications:

There were no Enterprise Applications left-over, the only ones I could find via Microsoft Graph were ‘Microsoft Internal’ Enterprise Applications, but due to the error message I still ended up spending a chunk of time trying to remove these as per the guidance found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/entra/identity/users/directory-delete-howto#remove-enterprise-apps-that-you-cant-delete. However, this did not achieve anything as it turns out deleting ‘Microsoft Internal’ Enterprise Applications has been blocked by Microsoft (naturally).

In the end I conceded and ended up raising a ticket with Microsoft Azure support.

To my surprise I was advised that the problem stopping me from deleting the tenant, was simply due to some legacy Microsoft partnership relationships still being registered to the tenant, despite licenses being fully deleted at this stage and the error message above suggesting otherwise.

So I got in touch with the three Microsoft partners and distributors in question and requested they removed the partner relationship. Once they had been successfully removed, a few days later the Entra tenant was able to be deleted successfully.

Summary

So if you’re ever in a similar situation and can’t delete an Entra tenant, I would certainly recommend you check to see if there are any legacy relationships left over, you can check these here: Microsoft 365 Admin Centre -> Settings -> Partner Relationships (https://admin.microsoft.com/#/partners).

Hope this helps and thanks for reading!