AAD B2C: Here Today, Gone Eventually

• Azure Active Directory B2C was designed to help organizations offer their end users easy sign-in to applications using popular user identity providers.
• AAD B2C remains available for existing customers, but the service is facing retirement at some point in the future and is expected to only receive security fixes.
• Entra External ID for customers, the successor service to AAD B2C, should be used with new applications.
• Although migration is not currently mandated, waiting for AAD B2C retirement limits the customer’s time to properly plan its eventual migration.

Azure Active Directory (AAD) Business to Consumer (B2C) is an identity management solution that enables users of third-party applications and other externally facing applications to sign in using most consumer identity providers (including Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) or custom identities provided by the hosting organization Microsoft. The service will be replaced by Entra External ID, but because AAD B2C required significant work to integrate into applications, organizations that have deployed AAD B2C will need considerable time to plan and move applications to Entra External ID for customers. For that reason, Microsoft has no immediate plans to retire the old service or force customers to move to Entra External ID, which became generally available in May 2024. While Microsoft has not offered any guidance on AAD B2C retirement or migration tooling to the new service, customers should begin preparing their own plans for migration even if not executed immediately. At best, Microsoft is only obligated to offer 12 months warning before retiring an Azure service, although more time may be offered due to the complexity of integration and customizations that were required with AAD B2C.