By By Paul Schnackenburg05/26/2026
Publication Date: 2026-05-26 00:00:00
Resilient Identity Foundation
Every user of Microsoft 365 or Azure relies on being able to sign in, or, in other words, we rely on Entra ID. Back in the Jurassic era of cloud, circa 2017, there were several high-profile, large outages in Entra ID, but since then there have been very few global disruptions.
This is a large service. In 2023, Microsoft said there were 610 million monthly active users of Entra, and at Ignite 2025 they said 1 billion users were managed by Entra (that includes internal users as well as invited guest accounts).
In this article, we’ll look at Entra ID resiliency from two angles: the architecture of the service itself, what’s changed since those early days, and the admin-facing resilience features, including soft delete, the new Backup and Recovery, and more.
One note: when it comes to the “architecture behind the scenes,” I’m basing the information on publicly known data. For obvious security reasons, Microsoft doesn’t reveal exact details in many areas, so some of these descriptions may be out of date, or not 100% accurate. Nevertheless, understanding the foundation that everyone using any Microsoft cloud service relies on is useful.
Built for Uptime
The two main changes that Microsoft…
