Ok here we go… long post. Sit tight and prepare for a story of horror, madness and pure pain.
Like a lot of IT professionals, I am heavily invested in the Microsoft eco-system. When it works, everything is fantastic and everything is connected, but when it fails, it is like your digital life gets nuked out of existence. One of my colleagues at work has, just like me and probably a lot of us, a Microsoft account since the OG Xbox days. This means he has been a loyal MS customer for 20 years or so. He has Office, Gamepass, Live, an EA subscription, a Visual Studio pro sub and has quite a bit of projects running on Azure (paid).
So about 4 weeks ago, suddenly his account got "locked" because of "suspicious activity". Ms declares that you can unlock this by filling in a form and they will get back to you within 24 hours.
A locked account? What does this mean for the loyal MS customer? And what does it mean for a
gamer?
- No more access to your emails
- No more access to OneDrive (and your backups and your old pictures/files/…). This is REALLY bad since OneDrive is constantly advertising to use it as a backup system. Never lose your files. Yeah sure… NOT! Some people have 20 year old family pictures on this and not locally synced. Can you imagine?
- No more OneNote and no more Office. If you are relying on Office for daily business or actual work, you can kiss all that goodbye.
- No more Xbox Live. If you didn't set your Xbox as your "home console" (my colleague didn't do this since he didn't need it) it is basically bricked. That nice and expensive Xbox One X is now effectively useless.
- Gamepass… forget it. Not on Xbox and not on PC.
- EA access, bye!
- Even if you have your Xbox as home console, you can play offline. That means all your grinding and building you did in online games (Fortnite, Apex, Minecraft,..) is now effectively gone. My colleague has 3 kids, try to explain to them they can't continue Fortnite or Minecraft. Seriously… try to imagine this.
- These 1000s of Euros/Dollars of games you have…. Hahahah… you wish sucker.
- Using that fancy new Edge Chromium browser? Lol… suddenly it doesn't work so good any more.
- Have kid accounts linked to your main account as a family account? Oh dear… no way to manage those any more.
- Using Azure for development or hosting websites? Gone, locked out.
- Using Azure DevOps to develop code and deploy? Bye.
- And all the time you are locked, MS keeps charging you for your services. Gamepass, Live, EA access, Azure…. Keep paying sucker.
All this would be a minor inconvenience *
if* MS could resolve this in a few days. But here is the kicker… usually it lasts 30-90 days!!! Also they do not communicate and you have no way to see what the status of your unlock request is. To make it EVEN MORE crazy, in many cases they just lock your account permanently.
Ha I hear you say…. But he got his account locked because he is obviously a dirty criminal?
Sure… a guy with a 20 year old account is surely doing stuff wrong on purpose Microsoft. Yeah… that must be it.
We did quite a bit of research online and asked a lot of other people how they think they got locked. Turns out it isn't that hard. One of the main culprits seems to be OneDrive. Remember it is advertised as a backup solution? Well backing up "illegal stuff" from your HDD can get you locked. Nudes? Porn? Maybe some illegal MP3s, some movies? Maybe even some roms? Yes, locked you pos criminal! Syncing pictures from your iPhone to OneDrive? Oh anything suspicious (your gf/bf naked? Maybe some pictures of your kids in the bath?). LOCKED!
I was under the impression you could do whatever you wanted on OneDrive as long as you didn't share it? Seems like MS thinks differently.
Anyway… I am personally moving away from MS after all that happened before my eyes. Moving my gaming back to PC and Steam. Basically your whole digital life gets deleted because some AI script detected "illegal activities" on one of your services. It just isn't worth it. It will take time and effort but I can't see this happening to me next gen. I will keep GP on my two X1X machines, but I will not invest any more in the MS "dream". This was more or less what people rebelled against when the XB1 was announced. It seems it happened right before our noses.
I am sure it can happen on other platforms, but because MS platform is so expansive and so extensive, the impact is incredible.
Stay away from the MS ecosystem, you have been warned.
