You have a lot more perseverance than I do. I would have opened up an AWS or GCP account after step one. I'm the one with the money and any company that makes it difficult for me to give it to them isn't worth my time.

Have you tried going through Sales? Account teams can usually move mountains if they can see a clear path to a paycheque - you might have luck just by going to the 'chat with me' popup on the azure home page and saying you have thousands of budget and would like to chat with a rep.

Doesn't help fix your problem, but I have a similar issue with Google Cloud Platform. Years ago I had a free workplace account that I had some small company emails and what not on, and apparently at some point over the years I setup a GCP project or two. Fast forward to the modern day and I haven't used the account in years so I decide to delete it. As the admin I hit the delete account button and it complains that I have services still active, so I go disable all the services which includes removing the workplace subsccription with all my billing info. I then hit delete again, at which point it complains that I have a project on GCP (not active, just created). So I go to delete it... which requires having a (paid) workspace account. So I can't delete the unused project without paying to re-activate the workspaces account I deleted, and I can't delete the whole account without deleting the GCP project. And of course Google has literally no support, so I just have a Google account hanging out there somewhere, probably with vaguely sensitive information from years ago on it, waiting for someone to guess the password or otherwise get into it.

The universe is saving you from spending money on Microsoft services. This is a good thing, stop trying to fight it and find a better, more worthy alternative.

Do you have to use Azure? Maybe Azure is nice and signaling this way the state of the internals and how things will work from here on. So it's sneakily trying to help you move to somewhere else, before things become worse and you spend the thousands and then end up stuck.

I ran into a similar issue with Hetzner. I had an outstanding bill that I forgot about (going to an email inbox I don't check often). They closed my account, and I haven't been able to pay the bill. I've tried contacting support, but I haven't got anywhere. I would love to pay the bill. I would really like to use Hetzner again, but I think I accidentally got banned. Also, I'm talking about an $8 dollar debt owed I accrued while not realizing my autopay was failing on a VM.

Hetzner has a similar loop. Autopay fails and they lock your account, keeping you from logging in to pay it.

I emailed support, &bthey insisted on a wire transfer. I sent that & they said they didn't get it. I sent them all the details my bank could find, but they kept asking for some paper document, which doesn't exist afaik because it was all done online.

I recently tried to sign up for the Microsoft Partner Network and the entire experience was grueling and excruciating from start to finish. I wasted two days on it and never managed to sign up.

Wow people love Microsoft so much that they are ready to go to such lengths to pay them money.

Could I interest you in some sweet data sovereignty? Try a medium size European cloud like Exoscale or one of our French competitors and you'll get better service, plus you'll know what privacy laws protect your data.

Would you really stay with a cloud provider after they did this to you? I don't presently use Azure, but if AWS did something like this to me, I would be switching providers immediately.

Why not open a new account? Surely for Azure you don't need a unique phone number for each one of them, right? You could run multiple companies after all. (I've got 5 independent AWS accounts, so expect some sanity like that)

Print out the invoice, write a check, and mail it in?

Please don't give MS any more money. Instead, try a company that will appreciate your business, like fly.io or render, etc. They aren't perfect but believe they will at least respond. ;-)

Maybe don't use Azure? It's not like there are no other options ...

You should probably consult a lawyer, or file a small claims court case for specific performance or refund of your $24 payment delivered by certified mail. In either scenario they will be motivated to accept and process your payment and restore normal services billing to you long before you see the inside of a courtroom, as lawyers cost them much more than $24/hour for an obvious fuckup on their side (and most likely they would have to send an actual executive to small claims court, where lawyers are unwelcome).

Look for cheaper alternatives (many of them in Europe and not only), smaller companies than Microsoft usually have a human to deal with such cases, also their services costs 5-10x less

Universal Commercial Code says that if your agreement does not specify a place of payment you can pay at any Microsoft office building. So check the agreement and if it doesn’t specify a place of payment then take $24 in cash to any Microsoft office building. If this doesn’t work, have a real litigation lawyer send their legal department a letter about them violating UCC and that a lawsuit is incoming.

It’ll get sorted.

Some vendors I use force me to login via MS Live account. The new thing MS is pushing is "Microsoft Authenticator" where I have to use their specific authenticator app or I can't login anymore. No way they could just use TOTP standard like anyone else. Completely crazy. Nothing they do is surprising

Microsoft sucks, don't bother, use a different cloud. I hear good things about BuyVM

(channeling Patrick McKenzie) If you have an S&P 500 index fund, you're a shareholder in Microsoft. Call their Investor Relations people, or send them a letter with this description. They will probably be of some help!

For people who might be interested in experiencing this: https://smarthome.steviep.xyz/

I've gone through some shenanigans like with AWS. I now have a rule that I don't use any cloud providers where I can't get proper customer service which rules out the main big clouds.

I'd say that Microsoft is doing everything right! They have managed to get such high customer loyalty that they can treat you lower than dirt and laugh and spit in your face. And you still do absolutely everything in your power to be able to be a customer of theirs. Even though there are many better options offered by competitors.

People and especially businesses will abuse you as much as you let them. So this is what you get and what you deserve.

IMO, take your money somewhere else. You don't want this to happen again later with more disasterous consequences.

I am stuck in a similar loop. I was attempting to verify my company account. I have been always told, that verification has failed, but never told why it failed. After few back and forth I have just gave up on whole Azure thing.

I had to dispute credit card charges with them and disable the card because I couldn't get a way to stop service. You tried harder than I did, which felt too hard

You really persevered!

Like everybody said, I would have dropped this. My only concern is if they send the 24$ to collection and it affects your credit score

I've had the same issue with Google.

I've not paid them a dime for 10 years because they fucked the payment system (imo).

It was just enough friction for me to mostly offload my data from Google's apps/cloud and run it myself.

So, in an odd way, I should thank them ...

Escape the loop by dropping them.

Companies this disfunctional do not deserve your business!!!

I locked myself out of Azure after losing 2FA which turned out to be different 2FA than the one tied to my Microsoft Account.

All support channels are now AI and refuse to help and redirect me to self service. There is _no_ self service path for Azure account recovery if you lose your 2FA token.

It's infuriating. I lost access to a bunch of hobby projects I had hosted on DevOps. Microsoft will never see a dime from me.

@snadella, lil help?

One of the ways I've used to get past automated telephone call handling to a person is to utter a string of strong profanities.

I hope you get this resolved. Good luck

obligatory xkcd is today's oddly enough. is OP Randle Monroe?

https://xkcd.com/3175/

seriously though customer support from mega corps is almost non existent anymore unless you are big enough to have lawyers negotiating your support contract for you or you have a social media fallowing bigger than some world leaders.

Now imagine it's your paying customers infrastructure that got reverse paywalled behind some system bug. That would be reason enough to drop it.

I've had luck with https://www.19pine.ai/ for nebulous support issues like this, worth a try!