Error Backing up SharePoint for unlicensed Users (archived users): 403 (forbidden)

[msobm]

Since 1-2 days, multiple Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 jobs on different Servers and for different tenants have started throwing errors for some SharePoint Objects:

Code: Select all

Failed to process site: https://tenant-my.sharepoint.com/personal/username. The response status code does not indicate success: 403 (Forbidden).

A quick check in the Microsoft 365 Admin Portal shows that all affected objects are users who are currently unlicensed, but were licensed in the past.
In many cases, the licenses were removed months ago—sometimes more than a year ago—yet there were no issues until 1–2 days ago.
In the SharePoint Admin Center, these users appear in the Unlicensed OneDrive accounts report with the status “Recently archived.”

I opened a support case with Veeam (Case #08068746), but their response was that we should manually exclude these users from the backup jobs.
That doesn’t seem right to me—creating and maintaining manual exclusions for every user who gets unlicensed after previously having a license does not scale.

Could this be related to Microsoft’s recent changes around archiving and billing unused OneDrive accounts? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/share ... e-accounts
None of the affected customers are using this feature (no billing configured), yet the users still show up in the SharePoint Admin Center as “Recently archived.” I suspect this is the root cause of the issue.

Has anyone else encountered this before or is experiencing the same behavior?

[aeph]

We've also been experiencing some SharePoint errors in our daily backups for the past 2–3 days.

The error message is a bit different:

"Failed to process site: XXX. Cannot contact site at the specified URL XXX. Access to this Web site has been blocked. Please contact the administrator to resolve this problem."

Case #08070381

[Polina]

Hi All,

Thanks for the heads-up, we haven't noticed anything like that yet, but will take a closer look now.

@msobm It'd be great to know how your job producing such errors are configured. Are users explicitly selected, or is it an Organization/sites protection, or any other option?

@aeph Do you see such an error on a personal or non-personal site?

[msobm]

Hello Polina

The Job has the Organization selected.
Interesting finding: At some Tenants, excluding the Users does not work. Excluding only works when selecting the coresponding personal Sites instead.

[msobm]

For the sake of completeness:
As a workaround, I have now excluded every affected site individually for each customer. This does work, but it is cumbersome and difficult to manage.
As a result, dynamic groups cannot be used in this scenario.

Do you have any idea what might be causing this issue?
At this point, I suspect a change on the Microsoft side that would require an adjustment in Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, specifically in how SharePoint sites eligible for backup are discovered or evaluated.

All tenants are located in EU or Switzerland. Not every tenant is affected.

[Kv3]

Hello,
Since Sunday evening 26.4.2026 I have the same problem as msobm when backing up Sharepoint of unlicensed users. Tenant is in EU

[tm67]

We also have seen a lot of errors over the last few days
#08073404
We do protect type:organization -> process: sites/teams

To create an exclusion for each user where a license gets removed is not really a solution for us when having a lot of tenants and thousands of users to protect.

[DHuppertz]

Same problem here since Update to v8.4.0.1457

[quebez]

same problem here. Tenant Location is Switzerland

Case #08073632

[Polina]

Hi All,

RND is already looking into it.
If such problematic sites are just skipped from processing, would it be an acceptable solution?

[tm67]

Hi Polina
Was there a change in 8.4 that can be reverted so the backups run again successfully? If yes, that would be the best solution.
Or is it just a display warning change so the backups did fail before but never issued any error in the logs? And now it generates an error. If so, skipping those sites might be the solution.

[ces]

I agree with tm67
To be able to give a proper answer to that, we need to know, if the behavior regarding errors/warnings simply changed or if the handling itself was changed (by Veeam and/or M$). Depending on that, we might be fine with skipping them, but not in either case.
#08075542

[Nicolas1202]

Hi,

We experiencing the same issue since yesterday.
The problem concerned the OneDrive users without licenses. It seems coming from a change in Microsoft side because nothing changed in our side.
Working with manual exclusions is not an option, it will be hard to manage and it worked previously.

Thanks
Best regards,
Nicolas

[andre.simard]

Hi,

We are experiencing the same issue across multiple tenants.
I also agree with the others: before stating that these can be skipped from processing, we need a better understanding of the root cause.

Thank you.