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How to Destroy Load Balancers

Validated on 28 Oct 2019 • Last edited on 9 Jun 2026

DigitalOcean fully manages Regional Load Balancers and Global Load Balancers, ensuring they are highly available load balancing services. Load balancers distribute traffic to groups of backend resources in specific regions or across different regions, which prevents the health of a service from depending on the health of a single server, cluster, or region.

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You can destroy a load balancer if you no longer need it. This is a permanent, irreversible action.

Note

Destroying a load balancer does not destroy the Droplets that were associated with it. You can destroy these Droplets separately.

Delete a Load Balancer Using Automation

How to Delete a Load Balancer Using the DigitalOcean CLI

Install doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI.
Create a personal access token and save it for use with doctl.
Use the token to grant doctl access to your DigitalOcean account.
```
doctl auth init
```
Finally, run doctl compute load-balancer delete. Basic usage looks like this, but you can read the usage docs for more details:
```
doctl compute load-balancer delete <load-balancer-id> [flags]
```

How to Delete a Load Balancer Using the DigitalOcean API

Create a personal access token and save it for use with the API.

cURL

Send a DELETE request to https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/load_balancers/{lb_id}.

Using cURL:

curl -X DELETE \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/load_balancers/4de7ac8b-495b-4884-9a69-1050c6793cd6"

Go

Using Godo, the official DigitalOcean API client for Go:

import (
    "context"
    "os"

    "github.com/digitalocean/godo"
)

func main() {
    token := os.Getenv("DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN")

    client := godo.NewFromToken(token)
    ctx := context.TODO()

    _, err := client.LoadBalancers.Delete(ctx, "4de7ac8b-495b-4884-9a69-1050c6793cd6")
}

Ruby

Using DropletKit, the official DigitalOcean API client for Ruby:

require 'droplet_kit'
token = ENV['DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN']
client = DropletKit::Client.new(access_token: token)

client.load_balancers.delete(id: '4de7ac8b-495b-4884-9a69-1050c6793cd6')

Python

Using PyDo, the official DigitalOcean API client for Python:

import os
from pydo import Client

client = Client(token=os.environ.get("DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN"))

resp = client.load_balancers.delete(lb_id="afda3ad")

Destroy a Load Balancer Using the Control Panel

From the Control Panel, click Networking in the main menu, then click Load Balancers. You can start the destroy flow in two ways:

Click the … (More) menu next to the load balancer and choose Destroy.
Click the load balancer’s name to open its detail page, click the Settings tab, and click Destroy in the Destroy section.

In the Destroy Load Balancer window, review the impact (connected Droplets are disconnected, the provisioned IP is released), type the load balancer’s name into the confirmation field, then click Destroy.