Case Study: How an Enterprise Handled a Third-Party Service Shutdown Without Losing Identity Data

When a major third-party service shuts down, your identity data and OAuth clients are on the line — act fast

Hook: Late-notice vendor shutdowns are an operational and legal nightmare for enterprises: lost user access, exposed PII risk, gaps in KYC/AML workflows, and broken OAuth integrations that stop revenue flows. This case study shows how a mid-size fintech handled the Jan–Feb 2026 Meta Workrooms shutdown scenario without losing identity data, and it gives a practical, step-by-step migration checklist and timeline you can use today.

Executive summary — what happened and why it matters (most important first)

In January 2026, Meta announced it would discontinue Horizon Workrooms as a standalone service, impacting enterprises using Workrooms for collaboration and SSO-backed identity flows. For organizations that integrated Workrooms via OAuth clients and held user/workspace metadata in the vendor platform, the shutdown threatened availability of identity-linked artifacts, created compliance exposures (data residency and retention obligations), and required legal notifications to partners and regulated authorities.

This case study (fictionalized but realistic for technical teams) walks through the incident response for a regulated fintech, NovaLedger, that relied on Workrooms for team access and used the service as a login provider for internal identity verification activities. We cover inventory, token handling, data export, legal notice drafting, and a migration timeline that minimized business impact.

Context & 2026 trends that make this relevant

Large platform consolidations and product sunsetting accelerated in late 2025 and early 2026. Meta's decision to discontinue Workrooms (effective February 16, 2026) is one example of a broader trend: major vendors reducing enterprise offerings as they shift priorities to AI and core consumer products. This increases the operational risk of relying on non-core third-party identity providers for critical flows.

"Meta has made the decision to discontinue Workrooms as a standalone app, effective February 16, 2026."

For security and compliance teams the takeaway is clear: assume any non-core vendor might exit a product line with short notice, and build repeatable playbooks to protect OAuth clients, preserve user data, and meet legal notification requirements.

Case study snapshot: NovaLedger

Profile

• Industry: Fintech (regulated, KYC/AML obligations)
• Users: 120,000 active users; 3,500 workforce accounts
• Integration: Horizon Workrooms used for team collaboration, SSO via OAuth with Workrooms as an identity provider for internal applications
• Data hosted: Workspace membership, user display names, avatars, meeting logs (non-sensitive) and pointer IDs that linked to NovaLedger's KYC records

Immediate objectives (first 48 hours)

1. Stop data loss: snapshot anything stored only in the third‑party console
2. Preserve authentication continuity: inventory and secure all OAuth clients and tokens
3. Assess legal and compliance obligations: retention, data portability, and notification windows
4. Communicate internally and externally: customers, partners, and regulators as needed

Step 1 — Incident triage & stakeholder mobilization

Within 2 hours NovaLedger executed an emergency runbook: convened security, platform, legal, and product owners. They declared 12–24 hour sprints for discovery and export. Key deliverable: a prioritized inventory of all artifacts stored on the vendor platform.

Step 2 — Inventory of OAuth clients and scopes

Inventory is the critical first technical action. NovaLedger used an internal script to enumerate all OAuth clients that referenced the Workrooms IdP across environments (prod, staging, dev) and documented scopes, redirect URIs, and application owners.

# Example: list redirect_uris and client_id tags from config DB (pseudo-SQL)
SELECT app_name, oauth_client_id, redirect_uri, scopes, owner
FROM oauth_clients
WHERE identity_provider = 'workrooms';

They classified clients by risk: interactive user flows (high), background service tokens (critical), dev/test tokens (low). This classification drove their rotation and revocation priorities.

Step 3 — Secure OAuth credentials: rotation and short-term revocation

For clients used in production, NovaLedger rotated client secrets and revoked refresh tokens that were only valid at the vendor. They used a staged approach:

• Issue new client credentials in an alternative IdP (on-prem IdP or vendor partner)
• Deploy parallel authentication endpoints with feature gates
• Revoke old tokens once traffic cutover confirmed

Sample revoke call (OAuth 2.0 token revocation):

curl -X POST https://workrooms.example.com/oauth/revoke \
  -d 'token=REFRESH_OR_ACCESS_TOKEN' \
  -u 'client_id:client_secret'

And a sample token rotation sequence in Node.js (simplified):

// Exchange old refresh token for new using new IdP
const got = require('got');
async function exchangeToken(oldRefreshToken) {
  const resp = await got.post('https://new-idp.example.com/oauth/token', {
    form: {
      grant_type: 'refresh_token',
      refresh_token: oldRefreshToken,
      client_id: process.env.CLIENT_ID,
      client_secret: process.env.CLIENT_SECRET
    }
  }).json();
  return resp.access_token;
}

User data export: preserving PII and meeting portability requirements

Meta’s help pages and typical vendor APIs provide export endpoints. NovaLedger prioritized exports by legal sensitivity and linkage to KYC records. They flagged any workspace metadata that contained identifiers mapping to regulated KYC data.

Step 4 — Request and validate data exports

Actions taken:

• Requested full data export via the vendor console/API for all workspace and user objects.
• Used vendor-provided export endpoints to get JSON/CSV dumps; if vendor offered a delivery window, they logged expected delivery times and set up automated polling.
• Validated checksums and record counts after export to ensure completeness.

Example export polling (curl):

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer API_KEY" \
  "https://api.workrooms.example.com/v1/exports/requests" 

# Poll status
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer API_KEY" \
  "https://api.workrooms.example.com/v1/exports/requests/{request_id}/status"

Step 5 — Secure storage and transformation

All exports were ingested into NovaLedger’s secure S3 bucket with server-side encryption and strict IAM policies. They applied a reproducible ETL that:

• Mapped vendor IDs to internal canonical IDs
• Redacted non-essential PII (e.g., avatars) where retention wasn’t permitted
• Maintained an audit trail for every transformed record

# Example: transform user export to internal format (pseudocode)
for user in exported_users:
  internal = {
    id: mapVendorToInternal(user.vendor_id),
    display_name: user.name,
    email_hash: sha256(lower(strip(user.email))),
    workrooms_workspace_id: user.workspace_id
  }
  writeToSecureStore(internal)

Legal & compliance actions

Vendor shutdowns trigger legal obligations: update privacy policy, meet data portability requests, and in some regulated verticals (fintech, healthcare) notify regulators and customers. NovaLedger’s legal team executed a three-part plan.

Step 6 — Draft notifications: customers, partners, and regulators

NovaLedger segmented stakeholders and issued notices with clear timelines and actions:

• End users: What to expect, how to continue access (new IdP or local accounts), and data export options.
• Partners: Technical migration windows for SSO connections and API keys.
• Regulators: For ongoing KYC/AML obligations, a notification covered the data preservation measures and continuity plans.

Legal templates used included a short-form technical summary, an FAQ, and a formal legal notice to regulators explaining retention and migration steps. Notices used a 30‑ to 90‑day window depending on local laws; where GDPR applies, NovaLedger supplied data portability exports on request.

Step 7 — Update contracts and DPAs for future resilience

Post-mortem steps included negotiating transition assistance clauses into future DPAs and adding explicit SLAs for export and data retrieval on vendor shutdown.

Cutover and migration: testing and execution

Step 8 — Deploy parallel authentication and test

NovaLedger adopted a dark-launch approach: new IdP endpoints were deployed in parallel; a small percentage of traffic was shifted for smoke testing. Monitoring focused on latency, error rates, and user friction metrics (login conversion)

Step 9 — Final cutover and post-cutover revocation

After validation, traffic was shifted fully to the new IdP and vendor tokens were revoked to eliminate orphaned sessions.

Timeline — checklist mapped to days and weeks

Use this timeline as a template for your enterprise response. Adjust windows by vendor notice period and your internal SLAs.

1. 0–48 hours
   • Assemble stakeholders (security, platform, legal, product)
   • Inventory OAuth clients and list critical integrations
   • Request data exports from vendor and start polling
   • Place temporary holds on non-essential deletions
2. Day 3–7
   • Complete export ingestion and validation
   • Spin up alternative IdP or prepare migration to existing provider
   • Draft and send customer and partner notifications
3. Week 2
   • Dark launch new auth flows; route 5–10% traffic for testing
   • Iterate on UX and SSO redirect handling
   • Negotiate transition assistance and confirm export completeness with vendor
4. Week 3–4
   • Full cutover to new IdP
   • Revoke vendor tokens and secrets
   • Begin long-term retention and archiving per policy
5. Month 2–3
   • Audit for missed links and address residual integrations
   • Update contracts and run lessons-learned

Migration checklist — ready-to-run

• Inventory: All OAuth clients, redirect URIs, scopes, and owners
• Export: Request and validate export for user and workspace data
• Preserve: Securely store exports with encryption and access logging
• Map: Build canonical ID map between vendor IDs and internal IDs
• Rotate: Issue new client credentials and rotate secrets early
• Test: Dark-launch new IdP with 5–10% traffic, collect metrics
• Revoke: Revoke old tokens and credentials after cutover
• Notify: Send segmented legal notices to users, partners, and regulators
• Document: Keep audit logs and full chain-of-custody for exports
• Contract: Add transition assistance and export SLAs into future contracts

Technical pitfalls and how to avoid them

• Missing redirect URIs: Many teams forget dev/test redirect URIs — run a config scan across repos and infra-as-code templates.
• Unmapped vendor IDs: Failing to map vendor IDs to internal KYC records can break lookups; canonicalize early.
• Token leakage: Ensure revocation of refresh tokens; consider short-lived refresh tokens in future designs.
• Rate limits: Vendor export APIs often have throttles — plan for segmented exports with backoff.
• Regulatory mismatches: Data residency rules may block moving exports to different regions; use encrypted regional storage where required.

Advanced strategies for future resilience (2026 and beyond)

Adopt a vendor-resilience program that treats identity integrations as first-class risks:

• Multi-IdP strategy: Architect your auth layer to support quick IdP swaps via an abstraction layer (OpenID Connect proxy or identity gateway).
• Data portability automation: Periodically script exports and validate backups to minimize RTO during forced migrations.
• Contractual protections: Require export reachability SLAs, retention guarantees, and transition assistance clauses in DPAs and vendor agreements.
• Chaos testing: Exercise the shutdown flow in tabletop drills and runbooks quarterly to reduce cognitive load in real incidents.
• Privacy-by-design exports: Store canonical mapping keys instead of raw vendor PII to reduce portability friction.

Post-incident: lessons learned from NovaLedger

NovaLedger completed the migration without losing identity data and preserved KYC continuity. Key lessons:

• Inventory and canonical mapping are the highest-leverage early activities.
• Parallel authentication paths and dark launches reduce risk of user-facing downtime.
• Legal notice and regulator engagement should happen within the first week for regulated industries.
• Build contractual export guarantees into procurement for all future identity vendors.

Checklist you can copy into your runbooks

1. Run an automated inventory of OAuth clients and owners.
2. Request vendor exports and capture request IDs and expected delivery times.
3. Ingest exports into encrypted storage; validate checksums.
4. Map vendor IDs to internal IDs and document mapping table with hashes.
5. Deploy an alternative IdP and dark-launch authentication flows.
6. Notify customers and partners with step-by-step migration instructions.
7. Revoke vendor tokens only after successful cutover and monitoring for 24–72 hours.
8. Log all actions for compliance and auditability.

Final thoughts — why you must prepare now

Vendor sunsetting accelerated in late 2025 and into 2026 as large platforms reprioritized. If your auth and identity controls assume vendor permanence, you will face disruption. The process above turns reactive chaos into a predictable migration path: inventory first, export second, and cutover with parallel auth and legal coordination.

Call to action

If you manage enterprise identity, add this migration checklist to your runbook today and schedule a tabletop that simulates a vendor shutdown. Need help operationalizing the playbook, automating exports, or standing up a multi-IdP abstraction layer? Contact the authorize.live technical team for a free readiness assessment and downloadable checklist tailored to regulated industries.

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