Trying to delete a SharePoint Site in SP Online - receiving List View threshold error

Question

I am trying to delete an old site in a SharePoint Online site collection. The site is completely empty apart from a default out-of-the-box "Microfeed" List which contains 0 items.

However when I try to delete this empty site, I encounter the "Sorry Something went wrong: The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold enforced by the administrator." error.

I am familiar with this error when dealing with Lists and Libraries which exceed the 5000 items threshold but I'm unsure as to why this is occurring when I am trying to delete an old empty site.

Does anyone have any ideas as to the cause of this/how to resolve this problem?

Many Thanks

Answer 1

You can try using PowerShell script to delete the site collection.

If the issue persists, try deleting all list items (whether they exist or not) with PowerShell and see if it works.

Please see the references below.

SharePoint Online: Delete Site Collection using PowerShell.

Fix SharePoint Online "The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold enforced by the administrator." in PowerShell.