In 2024 Microsoft announced general availability for it’s new SharePoint Archive feature. So if you are seeing “The site is archived” and “A SharePoint Administrator archived this site. If you need access, ask an admin to reactivate it.” and the page in your browser is “sharepointerror.aspx?scenario=SiteArchived” then… guess what… your site was archived.

Why it becomes a big deal? In 2025 Microsoft started archiving OneDrive sites belonged to unlicensed users for more than 93 days.So, for OneDrive sites – even if your OneDrive retention period is longer – if you restore the site from the sites recycle bin, the OneDrive will gets archived. To unarchive – you have to have a billing configured (as it’s pay as you go feature). So if you want to restore OneDrive from a recycle bin – ensure you assign license to the user before restoration. Or you have to pay for unarchiving.

If you need this site – please do as soon as possible, as reactivating the site within 7 days is free, otherwise it might cost your company some dollars:

• Reach to your SharePoint admin and
  • Share with admins the original site Url (actual site you want to unarchive),
    like this: “https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/teams/MySite”
    as the page “https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepointerror.aspx?scenario=SiteArchived” is just a general system page that displays the archival message.

Bug or feature?

Though the page Url is “https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepointerror.aspx?scenario=SiteArchived” and the page title is “Error” – this is not a bug, but just a new SharePoint feature 🙂