Since earlier this week, several Microsoft product users complained about the automatic deletion of files. The issue was seen persistent in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. Users say all the files they’ve shared among themselves are being deleted without informing and are seen in recycling bins. Microsoft hasn’t shared why it’s happening.
On Monday this week, we’ve seen a full-on outage of Microsoft’s cloud-based services like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Xbox Live, Exchange Online, Outlook.com, and SharePoint. While the company said it’d become a configuration issue in its Azure Active Directory, the services were soon up and running.
It had some unknown side effects like automatic file deletions in a few of the disturbing services like SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. As described by some SharePoint users, most of the files they’ve shared among themselves are somehow deleted and show up in SharePoint’s cloud recycle bin. And sometimes, also seen in the local PCs recycle bin.
All the deleted files bear the same timestamp when checked through the deletion history, and their respective folders are intact! This is soon interpreted as some system service issue since it’s unlikely that a human could delete several files at once without altering the folders. While this is confusing enough, many users from other Microsoft cloud services started reporting the same.
These include complaints from OneDrive and Teams video conferencing tools. One user-facing these issues reached out to Microsoft for an explanation, where they directed him to two advisories – SP244708 (SharePoint) and OD244709 (OnDrive). Both these advisories say the same thing, that the files in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint gets deleted, and said;
“Some users may have received some form of notification indicating that their files were deleted; such as a message from OneDrive stating “Remove files from all locations”, or a notice that their files were being removed from their synced folders and placed into a recycle bin.
Impacted users can manually initiate a resync to resolve the problem by restarting their machine. Subsequent file syncs will restore the files to the appropriate local folders.” Yet, users who tried what’s being suggested didn’t work out and had to do a manual restore of files. The exact reason for these actions isn’t explained yet.