Restore or remove a recently deleted application with the Microsoft identity platform

  • Article

After you delete an app registration, the app remains in a suspended state for 30 days. During that 30-day window, the app registration can be restored, along with all its properties. After that 30-day window passes, app registrations can't be restored, and the permanent deletion process may be automatically started. This functionality only applies to applications associated to a directory.

You can view your deleted applications, restore a deleted application, or permanently delete an application using the Identity > Applications > App registrations in the Microsoft Entra admin center.

Neither you nor Microsoft customer support can restore a permanently deleted application or an application deleted more than 30 days ago.

Prerequisites

You must have one of the following roles to permanently delete applications.

  • Application Administrator
  • Cloud Application Administrator
  • Hybrid Identity Administrator
  • Application Owner

You must have one of the following roles to restore applications.

  • Application Owner

View your deleted applications

Tip

Steps in this article might vary slightly based on the portal you start from.

You can see all the applications in a soft deleted state. Only applications deleted less than 30 days ago can be restored.

To view your restorable applications:

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center using one of the roles listed in the prerequisites.
  2. Browse to Identity > Applications > App registrations, and then select the Deleted applications tab.

Review the list of applications. Only applications that have been deleted in the past 30 days are available to restore. If using the App registrations search preview, you can filter by the 'Deleted date' column to see only these applications.

Restore a recently deleted application

When an app registration is deleted from the organization, the app is in a suspended state, and its configurations are preserved. When you restore an app registration, its configurations are also restored. However, if there were any organization-specific settings such as permission consents and user and group assignments for a certain organization stored in Enterprise applications for the application's home tenant, they're restored alongside the app registration.

To restore an application:

  1. Go to the Deleted applications tab. Search for and select one of the applications deleted less than 30 days ago.
  2. Select Restore app registration.

Permanently delete an application

You can manually permanently delete an application from your organization. A permanently deleted application can't be restored by you, another administrator, or by Microsoft customer support. However, this doesn't permanently delete the corresponding service principal. The service principal can't be restored without having an active corresponding application, so the service principal can be manually deleted, which is also permanent. If no action is taken, the service principal will be permanently deleted 30 days after deleting the application.

To permanently delete an application:

  1. Go to the Deleted applications tab. Search for and select one of the available applications.
  2. Select Delete permanently.
  3. Read the warning text and select Yes.

Next steps

After you've restored or permanently deleted your app, you can: