Chat history of 145,000 Microsoft Teams users permanently erased at KPMG

Another IT blunder, and this time the personal chat histories of 145,000 Microsoft Teams users at KPMG were inadvertently and permanently deleted this month. That's according to an internal email by Global CIO John Applegate to other IT leaders within the organization on Friday.

The company’s Global Technology & Knowledge (GT&K) group attempted to remove a single user's account from an active retention policy on Saturday, August 15. But the operation did not go as planned.

According to the internal memo, "In the execution of this change, a human error was made and the policy was applied to the entire KPMG Teams deployment instead of the specific account. This error resulted in the deletion of chat history from end users throughout KPMG."

The incident's impact, the message said, varies across the company's network, affecting some groups more than others. Though the applicable retention policy has since been reverted, the effects of the chat deletion may persist through Monday, August 24.

That may be something of an understatement since the chat discussions at issue are said to have vanished forever. "Microsoft has confirmed the Teams chat data is not recoverable," the message explains.

Only personal chats were lost, it is claimed, not chats conducted as part of a Teams meeting or Teams channel, and not any files uploaded to personal chat threads.

Microsoft, supposedly, put the number of affected accounts at 145,000 and is expected to provide an update on Monday.

While GT&K is dealing with the incident, changes to KPMG's Teams environments are said to have been put on hold and service requests can be expected to receive greater scrutiny, including a product management review and a "four-eyed" check process – approval will require two people instead of just one.

The IT group is also said to be working with Microsoft "to improve policy design and behavior in Microsoft Teams" – make the app less dangerous to data – and "to automate service execution and remove human intervention in policy management" – reduce the role of problem-prone people.