Solved – Microsoft 365 tenant dehydrated

Microsoft will sometimes “pause” tenants to reduce infrastructure costs. You will then get an error which contains “tenant dehydrated”. What this means and how to solve it, I will explain in this post.

Table of Contents

• What is “Tenant dehydrated”?
• How to undo this dehydration
• Check status
• Disable dehydration
• Summary

What is “Tenant dehydrated”?

Microsoft sometimes will dehydrate Microsoft 365 tenants where things will not often change to the tenant. This closes some parts of the tenant for changing, even if you have Global Administrator permissions.

The cause of this is for Microsoft to save on infrastructure cost. They will set the tenant in this sort of “sleep mode” where everything works properly but some configuration changes cannot be done. You can get this error with all sorts of changes:

• Creating a new group
• Creating a new management role assignment
• Creating a new role assignment policy
• Modifying a built-in role assignment policy
• Creating a new Outlook mailbox policy
• Creating a new sharing policy
• Creating a new retention policy

How to undo this dehydration

Fortunately, we can undo this with some Powershell commands, which I will show you:

Start by logging into Exchange Online PowerShell. If you don’t have this installed, click here for instructions.

Connect-ExchangeOnline

Then fill in your credentials and finish MFA.

Check status

When logged in, we can check the tenant dehydration status with this command:

Get-OrganizationConfig | ft Identity,IsDehydrated

This will show something like this:

Get-OrganizationConfig | ft Identity,IsDehydrated

Identity                               IsDehydrated
--------                               ------------
justinverstijnen.onmicrosoft.com       True

This outputs the status “True”, which means we cannot change some settings in our tenant and is in a sleep mode.

Disable dehydration

The following command disables this mode and makes us able to change things again (when still logged in to Exchange Online Powershell):

Enable-OrganizationCustomization

This command takes a few seconds to process, and after this commando we can check the ststua again:

Get-OrganizationConfig | ft Identity,IsDehydrated

Identity                               IsDehydrated
--------                               ------------
justinverstijnen.onmicrosoft.com       False

Summary

Sometimes, this error will occur what is very unfortunate but it’s not a really complex fix. We have to agree with Microsoft. They host millions of tenants which will almost never get any changes so putting them in this sleep mode is completely acceptable.

Thank you for reading this guide and I hope I helped you out fixing this problem.

You have reached the end of the page. You can select a category, share this post on X, LinkedIn and Reddit or return to the blog posts collection page. Thank you for visiting this post.

• Azure Master Class (12)
• Azure Virtual Desktop (17)
• Flying (15)
• Intune (3)
• Microsoft 365 (12)
• Microsoft Azure (27)
• Microsoft Defender XDR (4)
• Microsoft Entra (9)
• Networking (5)
• Powershell (18)
• Uncategorized (1)
• Windows 365 (2)
• Windows Server (12)

If you think something is wrong with this post or you want to know more, you can send me a message to one of my social profiles at: https://justinverstijnen.nl/about/

The terms and conditions apply to this post.