How to delete a Loop Workspace connected to a Teams channel?

Microsoft enabled (Teams) channel-connected Loop Workspaces in April. The workspace container is connected to the Microsoft 365 group, and all members have access to the workspace content. The team owners are also owners of the Loop workspace.

During my test, I wondered how Team owners could delete such channel-connected workspaces. I concluded that it’s not possible for them. Even if the owner deletes the Teams channel, the workspace is still undeletable. The Loop workspace remains.

A week ago, Microsoft confirmed this conclusion via an Insider post. A team owner cannot delete such workspaces, at least not in the current release state.
Microsoft prepared a comparison between Loop workspace for Teams channels and workspaces created in Loop on the web.

1. It’s hard for me to understand how a product team can release a feature without adding an option for deletion. It’s not unusual for team owners to want to delete a channel workspace. But it’s also not surprising for the Loop product if you remember the past.
2. As the workspace is not deleted if an owner deletes the Teams channel, your organization will soon have orphaned Loop workspace containers.
3. Remember that all Loop workspace containers consume your SharePoint tenant storage (which is not cheap if you must buy more storage).
4. Microsoft does not mention that accounts with the SharePoint Embedded Administrator role can delete these channel-connected Loop workspace containers via the SharePoint admin center or PowerShell.
   Note, accounts with the SharePoint Administrator role do not have permissions to delete Loop / SharePoint Embedded containers.

Before you delete such a channel container, here are some notes to consider:

• It’s important to remember that a Teams channel has one connected Loop workspace. If you delete a channel workspace, you delete the workspace content for the entire Teams channel (but not for other Teams channels).
• If the workspace is deleted, an existing Loop app in the Teams channel will show an error. Remove the channel tab to fix it.

• You can add the Loop app again to the channel. Teams will respond with an error, but if you confirm the error, Teams will create a new Loop workspace for the channel.

How do you delete a Loop workspace container in the SharePoint admin center?

1. Your account must have the SharePoint Embedded Administrator role assigned.
2. Open your SharePoint admin center > Containers > Active containers and filter for the ownership type Group.

3. Find your container, mark it, and delete it. The container will be moved to the SharePoint recycle bin for 93 days (and will still consume your SharePoint storage). You can also delete it from the recycle bin.

How do you delete a Loop workspace container with PowerShell?

1. Your account must have the SharePoint Embedded Administrator role assigned.
2. You need the latest version of the SharePoint Online PowerShell module.
3. Connect to your SharePoint tenant and list all GroupOwned workspaces. As I described some days ago, SharePoint Online PowerShell now includes the OwnershipType property for Loop containers.

Be careful if you have more than 200 Loop containers in your tenant. By default, SharePoint Online PowerShell returns just 200 containers, so you must loop through all the containers. The documentation includes paging samples.

# Keep in mind that you still have to use PowerShell 5 for SharePoint Online PowerShell

Import-Module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell
Connect-SPOService -Url "https://<Tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com"

$AllGroupOwnedLoopContainers = Get-SPOContainer -OwningApplicationID a187e399-0c36-4b98-8f04-1edc167a0996 | ?{$_.OwnershipType -eq "GroupOwned" }
$AllGroupOwnedLoopContainers | sort CreatedOn | select ContainerName,OwnershipType,CreatedOn,PrincipalOwner,ContainerId | ft

4. Find your Loop container ID and delete the container with Remove-SPOContainer. The container will be moved to the SharePoint recycle bin for 93 days (and will still consume your SharePoint storage).

$TeamChannelLoopContainer = Get-SPOContainer -Identity "<ContainerId>"
Remove-SPOContainer -Identity $TeamChannelLoopContainer.ContainerId

5. Optional: Remove the Loop container from the SharePoint recycle bin with Remove-SPODeletedContainer.

Remove-SPODeletedContainer -Identity $TeamChannelLoopContainer.ContainerId