How to Permanently Delete User Account without PowerShell in Office 365

Hi Everyone this is Prem, I have worked as Microsoft 365 Support Ambassador. In this blog I am going to share steps which we use to Permanently Delete User Account without PowerShell in Office 365.

 

Usually when we delete a user from the Admin Center > Users > Active Users, it goes into soft deleted state and stays there for 30 days before been completely deleted.

 

This deleted user can be found in the Admin Center > Users > Deleted Users tab, but there we don’t have any option to delete the user permanently.

 

To delete the user we usually use PowerShell and after connecting to Microsoft Admin Center we Run the following command:

 

Remove-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName "david@contoso.com" -RemoveFromRecycleBin

The above command removes david@contoso.com from the Azure Active Directory recycle bin. The command prompts you to confirm the operation. This command permanently removes the user.

 

The above command will only work when the user is in the Deleted Users tab or have been soft deleted from the Admin Center > Users > Active Users page.

 

If you want to delete the user permanently using PowerShell only then you will have to run 2 commands, 1st to soft delete the user and then to permanently delete the user:

 

Remove-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName "david1@contoso.com" -Force

The above command removes david1@contoso.com from Azure Active Directory. If the user has any licenses, the cmdlet removes these.

 

After the above command we run the command:

 

Remove-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName "david1@contoso.com" -RemoveFromRecycleBin

The above command removes david1@contoso.com from the Azure Active Directory recycle bin. The command prompts you to confirm the operation. This command permanently removes the user.

 

This was all on how to remove a user using the PowerShell, now to Permanently Delete User Account without PowerShell:

We will first delete the user from the Admin Center > Users > Active Users page:

 

 

Once the user is deleted from here it will appear in the deleted users tab:

 

 

Now to permanently delete the user we will have to go to Azure Active Directory(Its name has been changed to Identity) under Admin Centers:

Once in the Azure Active Directory, we will then click on Users > Deleted users > and select the user which we want to delete permanently and click on Delete Permanently followed by clicking on Yes:

 

 

In this way we can Permanently Delete User Account without PowerShell in Office 365.

These were the steps to Permanently Delete User Account without PowerShell in Office 365. Do let us know if this helped.

 

Date: 14/06/2021

Author: Prem

Tags: How to Permanently Delete User Account without PowerShell in Office 365.