Creating a team fans out provisioning across four services over several minutes; deleting one starts a 30-day clock most admins learn about during a crisis. Know both timelines cold.
The flow — what actually happens
Plain-language first; the packet-level
view underneath each step is what you'd see in a Wireshark trace, and what healthy looks like.
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Someone clicks Create team
One API call creates the Microsoft 365 Group — the land deed. Membership, name and privacy exist immediately. Everything else about the team is now a to-do list that services work through asynchronously.
On the wire Graph POST /teams (or group+team PUT). The audit log gets 'Added group' from Entra within seconds — your provable moment of birth.
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The fan-out (seconds to minutes)
SharePoint provisions the site. Exchange provisions the group mailbox (compliance store). Teams wires the General channel. These finish at different speeds — which is why a brand-new team can show 'we're setting things up' on Files: the room exists before the filing cabinet arrives.
On the wire First file upload is the site's real birth certificate; before provisioning completes, Graph /groups/<id>/drive returns 404 — retry-with-backoff is mandatory in provisioning scripts.
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Life: membership and policy drift
From here the team is just a group wearing a Teams badge — owners come and go (keep two minimum: the last owner leaving orphans the team), sensitivity labels enforce privacy and guest rules, expiration policy starts its renewal clock if you configured one.
On the wire Ownership changes land in the unified audit log as group role changes — an orphaned-team report is one KQL/Graph query over groups with zero owners.
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Death — which is really a coma
Delete the team and the GROUP is soft-deleted for 30 days: site, mailbox, channels, everything — restorable with one command, gone forever after day 30. Archiving is the alternative ending: read-only preservation, no clock.
On the wire The deleted group appears in Entra deleted items immediately (Get-MgDirectoryDeletedItemAsGroup); its permanent purge 30 days later writes nothing user-visible — day 31 'can you restore it?' has exactly one honest answer.
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