News
Azure AD Graphs Will Finally Be Retired in February
Microsoft on Thursday announced that Azure AD Graph APIs will stop processing application requests after Feb. 1.
"Our next big milestone starts February 1st, when existing applications will be prevented from calling Azure AD Graph APIs," wrote Microsoft's Rick Lewis, in a blog post. "You may not see impact right away, as we’re rolling out this change in stages across tenants. We anticipate full deployment of this change by the end of February."
The service, which has been on life support since the introduction of Microsoft Graphs in 2017, is used in app development. Microsoft has been touting the impending end of the service for years, and provided a tool in 2021 to help locate and replace any Azure AD Graph dependencies.
Additionally, Microsoft in December highlighted how IT professionals can spot these aged dependencies through the Microsoft Entra recommendations feature.
Microsoft recommends migrating to Microsoft Graph, as it "offers a single unified endpoint to access Microsoft Entra services and Microsoft 365 services such as Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Intune." While the early days of Microsoft Graph had functionality gaps that were included in Azure AD Graphs, Microsoft said that it has all the same capabilities and more, compared to the retiring service.
For those with legacy apps that will still need access to the Azure AD Graphs API, Microsoft has provided a workaround (however does not guarantee how long the workaround will hold):
If you have an application that requires access to Azure AD Graph APIs after February, you must update that application’s configuration, setting the blockAzureADGraphAccess attribute to false in the app’s authenticationBehaviors configuration.
After February, applications will receive a 403 error when attempting to access Azure AD Graph APIs unless this configuration setting is set to false.
With this flag in place, the application will be able to use Azure AD Graph APIs through June 30, 2025.