Windows account recovery process is fucked
MSFT must have the most fucked, braindead process for recovering a lost account I have ever seen. There has perhaps never been a more fucking hopelessly ass backwards process possible. Allow me to tell you a tale.
My entire MSFT account got nuked randomly after I tried to change the “primary alias” for my outlook account (oldEmail@hotmail.com → newEmail@outlook.com) retaining the same account data is something that MSFT allows). The alias did indeed change, but changed my password (?!) and logged me out of all devices at the same time, which right fucked me with no way to log in. It also refused to send any codes to any of the account’s recovery emails so I was really right fucked. Must have been some glitch with their system.
Hence, Account Recovery.
Just any fuckin’ email?
First thing you do in account recovery is put in the email to recover and an email for contact. Now, does this contact email have to be your recovery email? Nope, just any fuckin’ email. Strange, but alright. Seems like it would have been more straightforward to, mayhaps, just send a recovery code to my recovery email, because what the fuck else would a recovery email be used for. But perhaps MSFT is wiser than us, so I suppose I’ll play along.
In retrospect, I learned it literally does not matter if you put in one of the correct recovery emails or just any random fucking email, the process is the exact same so long as you can actually access the account.
Funnily enough, this also can apply at some stages of the recovery process with phone numbers. This means for account recovery, MSFT will just ask for any fucking phone number. Not one linked and verified to the account. Just any fucking phone number.
Run the gamut of nonsense
We now get an asinine Boomer-centric strategy for trying to prove identity: what old passwords did you use durrrr - since MSFT has apparently just thrown out all of the sacred recovery options I put into the account such as recovery email or phone number. Erm, let me just browse all the sticky notes titled “PASSWORDS DONT FORGET” from 2010 I still have stuck to my all-in-one Windows Vista PC.
This is not to mention the menagerie of other random identity-related straws we grasp at here such as skype, xbox, and the MSFT store. Skype doesn’t fucking exist anymore and hasn’t been used by anyone in 10 years. I surely will remember my username in the coming questionnaire.
What email address did I sign up for skype with? Probably the same fucking email I’m trying to recover.
Now we have to try to remember our most recent emails sent were.
Luckily for me, I almost never used this account except to send emails to one of my other accounts. I imagine this applies to at most 0.00001% of users; whatever, I’m lucky. So I simply looked what the most recent received emails were from the other account and put them in verbatim.
In retrospect, this did not help any more than putting in random letters. In my estimation all of this information you are painstakingly entering is essentially thrown directly into the trash.
There are several more pages full of other nonsense which I will not deign to bore you with.
Waste time filling out this shit, get ghosted
Submit your form and hope they get back to you in a reasonable time frame. Some (few) do, most accounts just get fucked. Mine got fucked. If you fill out the Account Recovery with woefully inadequate info, they’ll tell you right away you’re fucked. Otherwise, even if you have very accurate info in the account recovery form, they’ll just never email you back.
Agents’/MSFT reps’ typical responses for why this happens are pure gaslighting nonsense. They’ll tell you to keep resubmitting the forms with different info. This will amount to absolutely nothing besides sucking your free time away. I have filled out the form at approximately 1 month intervals for almost 6 months and have never heard a fucking word back from any account recovery process, except for the immediate failures I describe above.
Contact an Agent to get gaslit live
Let’s say you want to now talk to an agent. Maybe this is all glitch red tape that can be sliced through with a human’s touch. You should be able to log in, given you have access to the recovery emails (crucial!) and basic biographical info about the account (helpful).
You’ll be met with a complete lack of clear links to talk to an agent or - even better - wind up following circular “CLicK HerE fOr SuPpOrT” links between O365/Outlook/MSFTSupport, none of which work if you’re not mother-fucking already logged in.
I had to find the live support chat under a mysterious support page for Office365, in a totally unrelated section to the free version of Office. Let us now examine some of these chats
Apparently, there is nothing they can do.
Utterly impotent tech support tells me the account recovery form - yes, that Frankenstein’s monster of barely functional Javascript asking for my Skype username as evidence of identity rather than for my recovery email as credentials - is the only possible way to recover the account.
That’s right, there is no person in the entire company who can save my account apparently. And the only option is to keep toiling away on the idiotic recovery form, which I refuse to do as a sovereign and conscious human being.
The real problems are 3-fold:
- MSFT are making phone numbers first-class citizens for security rather than emails. If I have to explain to you why this is braindead, you are braindead.
- Account recovery is simultaneously too tedious, irrelevant, and irresponsible. It is the equivalent of a 50 question form asking about your favorite colors, which then displays a “Fuck you” pop-up box at the end and never give you closure about the account recovery.
- Live support is an Untouchables-caste citizen (in technical terms meaning unable to do anything or have any support, not like Untouchables in the Indian Caste system) who will gaslight you about (2) while having absolutely zero ability to rectify anything. While I get the danger of having support vulnerable to social engineering attacks, the fact that they are totally beholden to THE ALGORITHM even when I am in possession of the actual Recovery Email(TM) is just bananas, ESPECIALLY CONSIDERING the loss of the account (via unprompted password change during primary alias change) is entirely MSFT’s fuckup.