My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

Well I still have a non-signed-in local account on my Windows 11 Pro install, but of course every time I boot up I get a full screen “finish setting up your device” before I’m allowed to sign in. The only options are “continue” and “remind me in three days”. Better yet, I once clicked on continue by accident and the computer hang for three minutes before I shut it down. Now I only reboot when the machine BSODs, which (I kid you not) happens every three to five days.

Thankfully I only use it for some cross-platform testing and occasional gaming.

Is moving a personal account to a different country an insanely obscure edge case?

Because I tried to do that recently with O365 and I literally couldn't move my subscription without killing the old one and creating a new one.

Every other software service I use somehow managed to make it easy: fill in the new billing details. Done.

But not Microsoft. Billing and fulfilment details are on different pages, there's no obvious way to get from one to the other, and if you want to change country you can't.

Superb.

I gave Atlassian my school email address as verification that I worked at a university to get a free Bitbucket account. Ten years later, they not only locked me out of the Bitbucket account and gave access to someone at the university, and then refused to tell me what they'd done, they also gave my Trello account to them.

The thing about the Trello account is that I used a non-school email account for that. I never at any point gave them information about my school account. I opened the account on the day Trello was announced, when they didn't even have paid plans. I'm guessing they were able to link me somehow, and they used that information to give my account away.

Clearly Atlassian is not a company that should ever be trusted with important data. In my case, if I had any information about grades in my account, it would have been a violation of FERPA. You can't casually hand out that information to random strangers.

I can’t give Azure money if I tried. And I have repeatedly.

About 10 years ago I created an Azure account with my normal email and my US address. I did some stuff but never had a reason to use Azure in a situation where I’d pay for resources. Some years later I wanted to check out Azure for a small project. I go to log in and it tells me I need to add billing or something. I enter my credit card info and get to the address section. My zip code won’t validate. That’s odd. It’s saying it wants numbers and letters. Wait why does it think I’m in Canada? I’m in California. CA? Hmm. Anyway should be easy let me fix the Country. Oh it’s greyed out. YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE COUNTRY?!

Surely this must be a bug. File a support request. Nope can’t change country. Escalate and explain that I can’t add a credit card because I am not a CA resident and don’t have a Canadian payment method. They tell me they can’t change for tax reasons. But they never took my money because I can’t pay them… I go on to tell them I never even selected Canada there must be some UI bug when they first rolled out the new account format. They said theres a known issue where this can happen. I ask them to fix. They can’t because taxes. They tell me I have to create a new email if I want to use Azure. I wont do that because I have virtue.

I try two more times over the course of 6 or so years. Both times I’m escalated to someone who thinks they can fix the problem for me. I think at one point there was a technical work order put in to delete my Azure account so I could try again. But somehow it always gets thwarted.

So what happened? I’ve been able to piece together that Azure transitioned to a new account model between when I first created my account and when I tried again the first time. The old model was independent of your MS account. The new one not so much. Somehow Azure migrated my legacy account with a US address and morphed it into an account with a Canadian country set. This Canadian account is intimately linked to my normal MS live account which has a US address and payment info nonetheless. An early version of the Azure account migration UI locked in your country before verifying your payment/address. For “tax reasons” you cant change but it’s totally fine that my US live account has a Canadian Azure account and that, if I was able to do things as MS wants, I’d be paying for MS apps and services with a US card and Azure resources with a Canadian one. Because that’s better for taxes?!

So to this day I can’t use Azure because I’m not willing to change my live account login email address, my main email address, to something else just to work around MS’s bullshit. Because yes, now it’s all the same and your azure account is your live account.

That’s a known issue and we have a simple workaround: just kindly make a new email address…

Because as someone who has done support for a 28000 person organisation, 27500 of which are using mostly Microsoft products on windows for 90% of the time and 500 of which are using Mac or Linux and doing other stuff I can tell you that at least 50% of the security incidents and second line support issues came from those 500 users.