How was the deprecation of Multi-Tenant bots communicated?

[justin-mellor]

Creation of Multi-Tenant bots stopped working after 31st July. This was not a change in the SDK but a change in the Azure Management service. As far as I can tell it was put in documentation, but as we use APIs to deploy bots automatically the first we knew was when it stopped working. Unlike more Azure services no email was sent to users of the resource warning them of the change.

How were we meant to find out about this? Also how should we find out about similar changes in the future so we don't get caught having to make emergency fixes to code.

If this was a change in a new version of the SDK I would understand just putting it in documentation / release notes, but when it is a change in a live service surely there must have been some way to notify customers.

[Prasad-MSFT]

You're absolutely right to be concerned about the lack of proactive communication regarding the deprecation of multi-tenant bot creation in Azure, which officially took effect on July 31, 2025. Here's a breakdown of how you can avoid similar surprises in the future:

Azure Service Health Alerts:
You can configure alerts for health advisories, planned maintenance, and service retirements. These alerts can be surfaced in your monitoring stack or sent via email/SMS.
Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-health/

Azure Updates RSS Feed:
Subscribe to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/ via RSS to track changes across services. You can filter updates by service and region.

Review the Azure Deprecation Dashboard:
https://azurecharts.com/timeboards/deprecations

[justin-mellor]

Hi Prasad,

As far as I can tell the change was not sent out via a Service Health Alert (I am subscribed to them); I can not see it in the Azure Updates feed; and I cannot find it in the Azure Deprecations list.

Can you tell me where the change was communicated, because as far as I can tell if I followed your recommendation I would still not have been informed in advance. Maybe I am missing something

[jamesemann]

@Prasad-MSFT can you follow up on this please and advise. It doesn't seem like it was appropriately communicated in this instance

[Prasad-MSFT]

Sure @jamesemann, we are checking this with concerned team and will update you once we hear from them. Thanks!

[jamesemann]

Thanks @Prasad-MSFT but I want to stress this is not just an inconvenience. The lack of communication around this breaking change caused direct commercial impact for us, with several days of engineering effort diverted to emergency remediation.

[biom-andy]

Hi, is there any update to this, only this breaking change caused an outage within our solution that impacted customers until we were able to deploy an emergency fix.

Due to this outage, we needed to created a 'reason for outage' document that could be shared with our customers, part of which is lessons learned to prevent it from happening again, which is where we would really benefit from an update. We're currently waiting for your update so that we can highlighting how these types of changes will be communicated in the future, potentially also updating our own internal processes if they're not going to be communicated by the Azure update emails, which we receive for other changes.

Thanks in advance.

[justin-mellor]

Hi @Prasad-MSFT It has been 3 weeks since you said you would reach out to the team concerned. Has there been any statement on this?