Graph PowerShell 2.41.0: Connect-MgGraph fails loading System.Text.Json 10; downgrading to 2.40.0 resolves

[aolszowka]

Describe the bug

We encountered an assembly-loading failure at Connect-MgGraph after installing Microsoft Graph PowerShell 2.41.0. Pinning both Microsoft.Graph.Authentication and Microsoft.Graph.Groups to 2.40.0 (the previous version) appears to resolve the failure.

Component	Version
OS	Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS
PowerShell	7.5.5
PowerShell runtime	.NET 9.0.14
Az.Accounts	5.3.3
Microsoft.Graph.Authentication	2.41.0
Microsoft.Graph.Groups	2.41.0

This runs on an ephemeral Azure DevOps agent. An AzurePowerShell@5 task (using pwsh=true) invokes Redgate Flyway, which launches a child pwsh process for a deployment callback. Diagnostics from the task and a seperate child process both reported the runtime and available module versions above.

Expected behavior

We would expect to be able to roll forward without issue.

How to reproduce

The callback imports the following modules and connects using an access token obtained through Az.Accounts:

Import-Module Az.Accounts -ErrorAction Stop
Import-Module Microsoft.Graph.Authentication -ErrorAction Stop
Import-Module Microsoft.Graph.Groups -ErrorAction Stop

$azContext = Get-AzContext -ErrorAction Stop
$graphAccessToken = (
  Get-AzAccessToken `
    -ResourceTypeName MSGraph `
    -TenantId $azContext.Tenant.Id `
    -AsSecureString
).Token

Connect-MgGraph -AccessToken $graphAccessToken -NoWelcome

This fails with an assembly-loading error referencing:

System.Text.Json, Version=10.0.0.0

SDK Version

2.41.0

Latest version known to work for scenario above?

2.40.0

Known Workarounds

Rolling back to 2.40.0 works as expected.

• Installing the umbrella Microsoft.Graph module does NOT resolve the failure.
• Installing the .NET 10 SDK on the agent did not resolve the failure, but we did not validate that the PowerShell callback ran under .NET 10 (it is believed we'd need to upgrade PowerShell 7 to do this)

Debug output

No response

Configuration

No response

Other information

#3789 seems like the likely culprit, thoughts Stephan van Rooij (@svrooij) ?

[svrooij]

You say your running on Powershell 7.5.x which has .net 9 so it cannot load the requested system.text.json version 10

I don't want to do any remarks on the end of life of certain .net versions that is up to someone else.

Quick fix upgrade PowerShell to 7.6.x
And maybe we have to also bundle and load the system.text.json, instead of relying on the platform provided version.

[aolszowka]

Fair enough and frankly that's what our internal RCA was coming up with as well. I'm happy to have the issue closed out with a comment to get to 7.6.x (7.5.5 is EOL on 11/10/2026 which is 40 Days out, but that is beside the point).

Thanks for the quick response.

[12Knocksinna]

Same problem affects Azure Automation runbooks using the PowerShell 7.2 and 7.4 runtime environments. A possible workaround is to use the PowerShell 5.1 runtime environment, but that might be possible in all circumstances.