DevOps users getting deleted when Office 365 users are deleted

Hi,

Currently our Office 365 accounts from Azure Active Directory are viewable in DevOps. When adding a user in DevOps, we would search for these accounts to add. When a staff member leaves, their Office 365 account is blocked and then eventually deleted.

We noticed that when it's deleted, the DevOps account is also deleted. I have a few questions:

- What happens to the issues that were assigned to the now deleted account?

- When the user is deleted from DevOps, is it a hard-delete or a soft-delete (flagged as deleted)? If it's the latter, is it possible to search for them via DevOps?

- If it's a soft delete, could we still assign them to a group? The reason I'm asking this is we have a couple of Power BI reports in which one of the search criteria is users in a group. It seems to work, but we can't add former employees to these groups.

- Our company recycles email addresses when a new employee joins. For example, if mailto:email address removed for privacy reasons was previously used by a former employee, it can be reassigned to a future employee. If this account is then added to DevOps, does it get "assigned" to the previous employee's issues?

Sincerely,

Jason