Office 365 – How to Totally Delete an Office 365 Organization and All Data

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Is it possible to totally delete all data about your organisation on Office 365, to get to a place where your Office 365 account might as well have never existed?

By this I mean is it possible to delete things like:

  • The organisation
  • The last remaining global administrator
  • The default domain

Such that you can't even sign in any more.

(Context: I have waited for all subscriptions to expire, received the warning email that "Your Office 365 subscription is about to be deleted", and watched Office 365 blow away all data that was part of any subscriptions my organisation had. But whether the 'last mile' – the Office 365 account itself – can be deleted is still a mystery to me.)

Best Answer

Here is the Office 365 tenant deletion policy (where "tenant" = your organisation on O365) according to one customer support rep:

To cancel a tenant, we need to first cancel all the subscriptions under it. After the subscriptions are canceled, the data including all users will be removed permanently in 30 days and the tenant will expire naturally in around 145 days.

Source: Office 365 customer support request

That conversation also mentions that due to the highly destructive nature of tenant deletion, Office 365 support staff are not allowed (at least in normal circumstances) to manually override this process.

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