No, Active Microsoft Teams Free Organizations Will Not Be Deleted

If you received an email in April stating that your active Microsoft Teams Free account is being deleted, this email was sent by mistake and Microsoft is not deleting your data.

Last month, Microsoft Teams Free admins began receiving emails stating that their ‘trial’ was expiring and users would delete data if they did not purchase a paid subscription.

“If you don’t purchase a new subscription by May 3, 2021, your trial data will be available to all people in your organization for about 30 days. At that time, the subscription status changes to Disabled, and only admins will have access to trial data for about another 90 days. After that, your trial is permanently deleted,” the email stated.

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In a new article posted yesterday by Microsoft Product Manager Sam Cosby, Microsoft explains that these emails were sent by mistake and active Microsoft Teams Free organizations will not be deleted if they are actively used.

Cosby explains that Microsoft introduced a new method to clean up inactive Microsoft Teams organizations by warning admins that Microsoft would begin closing accounts and ultimately deleting data for being inactive over the past ninety days.

“Back in January of 2021, there was an implementation of a new method to help reduce the number of Teams Free organizations that go unused over a 90-day period of inactivity by deleting them.”

Only organizations that did not have any sign-ins during this period and/or the grace period after the 90 days (120 days in total), would eventually become deleted,” explains a new Microsoft Teams post by Cosby.

However, a bug in this routine caused the email to go out to Microsoft Teams Free admins even if their organization has been active on the service.

Microsoft is assuring Microsoft Teams Free users that only organizations that have not been in use for a total of 120 days will be deleted.

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All other active Microsoft Teams Free users will be able to continue using the service for free.