The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility - Extremely Brilliant Source (ESRF-EBS) is a facility upgrade allowing its scientific users to take advantage of the first high-energy 4th generation light source. In December 2018, after 30 years of operation, the beam stopped for a 12-month shutdown to dismantle the old storage ring and to install the new X-ray source. In December 2019, the first beam was stored and accumulated in the storage ring, allowing the vacuum conditioning and tuning to be started. The beam was delivered to beamlines in March 2020 for their commissioning. On 25 August, the user programme was restarted with beam parameters very close to nominal values. In this report, the milestones and key aspects of the return to user-mode operation are presented and discussed. Proceedings of the 12th International Particle Accelerator Conference, IPAC2021, Campinas, SP, Brazil
