Unable to create channel - name in use

[Ed Hansberry]

I am trying to create a channel in a team. It is a customer name so it must be the customer's name or it won't be easily discoverable, so I cannot just slightly modify the name of the channel.

We had a channel in this team years ago with this name that was deleted in 2017. When I try to create the channel Teams tells me a channel with this name already exists, so I looked in the Deleted Channels section of the UI and there it is, but it was deleted April of 2017, almost 3 years go. I tried to restore it but that failed.

There are about 20 channels in that deleted channel list going back to 2017.

How can I purge those? Preferably without powershell, but I'll take anything a this point, but I'll need some details if powershell is the only way.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately you can’t. There was a bug that anything before like May of last year is stuck forever and never actually deleted. So your only option at this currently moment is to Create a new team with the channel.

You could try support. Not sure if they would be able to or go in and fix it on the back end or not.

[#3]

@Chris Webb that is a HUGE UGHHHH!!!!!

Thanks for the info though.

[#4]

so here we are Jan 21, about 3 weeks after this hit us. I opened a ticket with Microsoft on Jan 3 (actually my VAR, so MS didn't get involved for 2-3 days probably) and they have now confirmed it is an issue, and other customers are impacted.  It is like they had no idea this was an issue. Am I the first one to file an official ticket on this?

I don't know how MS didn't hit this internally. We launched Teams in our org in Sept 2016, the day the beta went live, but they had to have been using it earlier, and this seems to only impact channels deleted in 2016, 2017, and I've had one Jan 2018 channel that I see still hanging around in the "Deleted Channels" section.

Maybe next I'll open a ticket on how to remove "OneNote" from the tabs of those very early Teams where it was a permanent tab just like Files and Conversations.

[#5]

Yes they know about it, support always seems disconnected with what's going on, and it's supposed to have been fixed for Teams created after May 2018. Problem is Teams before that I guess are SOL.