After the recent Azure Active Directory outage that took place earlier this week, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams users are complaining that their files are missing. Microsoft faced a huge outage that negatively impacted almost each cloud service such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Xbox Live, Exchange Online, Outlook.com, and SharePoint. Microsoft declared that this was a consequence of a configuration problem of the Azure Active Directory Service.

When the admins probed into the problem, they noticed that the SharePoint folder structure was intact whereas no files were to be found. Ultimately it was detected that the files were located in SharePoint's cloud recycle bin, or in some scenarios, in a local PC's Recycle Bin. An IT consultant in Pennsylvania examined his clients' computer systems and saw that the SharePoint data had been deleted and was shifted to several Recycle Bins. Similar complaints were found online as users posted at Microsoft community forums and Reddit.

"Today we discovered that we are missing hundreds of files. Strange was, that we were missing only files... folders were there. We found who deleted them (in SharePoint recycle bin) but she claims that she did not delete anything. Because she is newcomer she was browsing through many files and she claims she found the files she opened in computer's recycle bin the next morning."

"Because the files, I've seen in her recycle bin, were deleted almost at the same time I would believe her as it would be impossible for a normal user to delete so many files in such a short timeframe. The only way to do that is to delete all folders, but only some files at some folders are deleted," a SharePoint admin posted to Microsoft's community forums, looking for help.

Another report came via an email sent by Ted Kinczkowski of Harbor Computer Services, who faced a serious concern as thousands of files of his client were deleted from SharePoint, and Kinczkowski was forced to alter the user’s password to safeguard him from any data theft. Microsoft said that this was linked to the Microsoft advisories SP244708 (SharePoint) and OD244709 (OneDrive).

"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."

Monday's Azure Active Directory (AAD) outage is the root cause behind both the issues.