This has already happened. Classic SharePoint Alerts were retired in July 2026, and every alert configured across your tenant stopped delivering notifications on that date. Microsoft has removed the feature: existing alerts can no longer be extended and no longer fire. If you have arrived here because notifications quietly stopped and nobody could work out why, that is the explanation, and the rest of this page covers what to do about it now rather than how to prepare for it.
What are SharePoint Alerts?
SharePoint Alerts are per-user subscriptions that send an email or SMS notification when a file, list item, or folder changes in a SharePoint document library or list. Users set them up through the "Alert Me" option on any list or library, choosing the type of change to track and the notification frequency: immediate, daily digest, or weekly digest.
Microsoft is retiring the feature as part of a broader modernisation effort. The company's position is that SharePoint Rules and Power Automate provide better control, more flexibility, and a more sustainable technical foundation for tenant notifications going forward.
The retirement timeline
| Date | What changes |
|---|---|
| July 2025 | New alert creation gradually disabled for newly onboarded tenants |
| October 2025 | Existing alerts begin expiring after 30 days; users can individually self-extend each alert |
| January 2026 | New alert creation blocked for all existing tenants |
| July 2026 | All remaining alerts stop functioning; the feature is fully removed from SharePoint Online |
Source: Microsoft Support - SharePoint Alerts Retirement
What stopped working in July 2026
Users no longer receive any notification set up through the classic SharePoint Alerts interface. This includes:
- Immediate alerts triggered by file or item changes within a library or list
- Daily and weekly digest emails that summarise recent changes across a library
- Alerts scoped to specific list views rather than the full list
- Alerts configured to notify when someone else modifies an item the user owns or tracks
Browser-based SharePoint access, co-authoring in Office applications, and Power Automate flows built independently of the alerts framework are not affected by this retirement.
The recommended replacements
Microsoft recommends two paths depending on the complexity of each notification scenario:
- SharePoint Rules: for simple, single-condition notifications on lists and libraries. Rules are configured directly in the SharePoint interface, require no Power Automate licence, and handle the most common alert use cases: notify when an item is added, modified, or deleted. Site owners can configure them without admin involvement.
- Power Automate: for anything conditional or multi-step. The SharePoint Online connector in Power Automate includes triggers for item changes, file modifications, and folder events. Flows can route notifications to a Teams channel, send emails to a group address, or trigger approval processes. Microsoft provides ready-to-use templates that replicate the most common classic alert scenarios, which reduces the rebuild effort for standard cases.
The practical split for most organisations: use SharePoint Rules to replace straightforward library-change alerts with minimal configuration overhead, and use Power Automate for anything that previously sent to a group address, required conditional logic, or targeted changes made by a specific user.
How to work out what you have lost
Classic SharePoint Alerts are set per user per list. There is no centralised admin console that surfaces all active alerts across a tenant in one view. Two practical approaches for an audit:
- Microsoft 365 Assessment Tool: Microsoft's tenant scanning tool can identify alert usage across sites and generate a usage report. This is the most practical starting point for tenants with many site collections.
- PnP PowerShell: The
Get-PnPAlertcommand retrieves all alerts for a given site or user. Scripting a loop across all site collections produces a complete inventory for environments where PowerShell access is available.
Start with libraries and lists where notification failures would cause the most disruption: document libraries used by compliance or legal teams, project tracking lists used across departments, and shared calendars or task lists where change notifications are embedded in an established workflow. For a broader view of which sites and libraries in your tenant carry the most active content, Report Master generates Excel-based storage and activity reports that help prioritise where to focus the alert migration effort.
For a related checklist on auditing who has access to those same libraries, see the guide on how to audit SharePoint permissions across your tenant.
One category of alert is worth striking off the list before you spend any effort migrating it. Alerts attached to Project Web App sites do not need replacing at all, because the sites themselves are going: Project Online retires on 30 September 2026 and PWA sites are removed with it. If your audit returns alerts on PWA content, the work those represent is not a notification migration but a data extraction, and it has the earlier deadline. What happens to Project Online data after retirement covers what survives and what does not.
Frequently Asked Questions
Have SharePoint Alerts stopped working yet?
Yes. Microsoft retired classic SharePoint Alerts in July 2026 and the feature has been removed. All existing alerts stopped functioning on that date, including those users had individually extended since October 2025, and they cannot be extended or re-enabled. If notifications stopped arriving, this is the cause.
What replaces SharePoint Alerts?
Microsoft recommends SharePoint Rules for simple, single-condition notifications and Power Automate for conditional or multi-step scenarios. Both are available within Microsoft 365; Power Automate flows beyond the included tier require a Power Automate licence.
Can I still find out which SharePoint Alerts my tenant had?
Not reliably. There was never a single built-in admin view consolidating all alerts across a tenant, and the usual inventory methods (the Microsoft 365 Assessment Tool for a tenant-wide scan, or PnP PowerShell's Get-PnPAlert run site by site) were designed to enumerate alerts while the feature still existed. After the July 2026 removal, expect them to return little or nothing. Reconstruct the list from where notifications actually mattered instead.