I cannot pay this invoice. There is no button to pay it. There is no button to dismiss it. There is no way to interact with it at all.
Azure displays a banner: "You must pay all previous invoices before creating new subscriptions." Fair enough. I would love to pay it. Microsoft won't let me.
So I tried to contact support.
The Azure portal requires a "paid support plan" to create a support ticket. To purchase a paid support plan, you must create a subscription. To create a subscription, you must clear outstanding invoices. To clear outstanding invoices, you must contact support.
Azure on Twitter, as well as the website claims to have a "free support ticket" option for billing issues, but every possible link just drives you back to the same FAQ page while refusing to let you submit a ticket.
I called every number I could find:
1-800-867-1389 rings busy indefinitely. 1-855-270-0615 connects to an AI that asks what you need, tells you to visit the website, and disconnects. 1-800-642-7676 connects to a different AI that also tells you to visit the website. The website has a chatbot that redirects you to FAQ articles regardless of what you type. If you express frustration, it throws an error and stops responding.
I submitted feedback through the Azure portal every few days for weeks. No response.
I am a software engineer, so I did something ridiculous.
I wrote a PowerShell WinForms application that authenticates via device code flow, queries the Az.Support API for problem classifications, and calls New-AzSupportTicketsNoSubscription to submit a billing support ticket directly, bypassing the portal entirely.
Note the API name: NoSubscription. Microsoft has an explicit API for ticketing without a subscription.
It worked. The ticket was submitted. I felt briefly victorious.
The API responded: "Your support plan type is Free. To create and update support tickets, you need access to our high-tier support plans."
I had built custom software specifically to work around Microsoft's broken support infrastructure, and I still hit a paywall.
The total amount Microsoft is owed: $24.
The total amount Microsoft is preventing me from spending on new Azure services: thousands. I currently run numerous websites out of my house, and it's getting to be enough that I want to offload it to Azure VMs. Additionally, I was going to shift my development to Azure boxes, etc.
I have exhausted every official channel. Every phone number, every chatbot, every feedback form, every API endpoint. There is no path to a human being without first paying for a support plan that I cannot purchase because of the billing block that I need support to resolve.
Has anyone successfully escaped a loop like this? Is there a secret handshake I'm missing? Or is the only option to abandon this Microsoft account entirely, get a new phone, and start fresh?
I closed the browser entirely, reopened it, and then told the AI that I "have a large budget and need to speak to a sales assistant". It then asked one question: "Is this for a business or personal purchase?" I said business, and then boom, immediate connection to a human.
THEY were able to submit the support ticket for me. But their recommendation? Just create a new account entirely. Which, obviously, is NOT an answer.
When your ONLY source of "help" is the only people in the company you can reach telling you to just "give up" on your primary account, I think it's time to switch vendors.
If the non-reporting is a problem of the non-techs or techs at a company is an open question, but it's often a shared problem connected to non-techs coming with stupid things at one point and fundamentally important stuff at other times.
Anyhow, they usually should know how to get proper escalation to get shit done when hounded enough.
I've already started playing with AWS to see how hard it is to spin up VMs there.
It's definitely damned if you do, damned if you don't regardless of which cloud provider is being discussed. They all have their own thorns
It's literally easier to just set up a fully functional active directory network in your basement.
It’ll get sorted.
"If Microsoft's solution to a simple billing issue is, 'Create a new account and start over,' then what happens the first time we have a simple issue in our production application? Or even in our development environment during the development stage? Are we just down for weeks until Microsoft tells us, 'Create a new account and start over?'"
I think I have a pretty compelling argument to pivot what would've been an easy $10M (over 10 years) project to a different vendor. I may not be able to win the argument to going to a smaller vendor, but Microsoft just lost a chunk of change if I can sway the client.
Basically my point is -- why rebuilding existing GCP/AWS infra into Azure in the first place? More so if it wasn't on any "cloud" at all before.
You don't need to change your phone to get a new account. And you don't have to change your personal email. And definitely don't need to change the physical device.
By going through that entire process, I now have a very compelling argument to go to the client with to recommend we switch vendors entirely.
Which will not only ultimately lose Microsoft a significant chunk of money, but will save ME future problems when their systems blow up again and I'm once again unable to get an answer better than, "create a new account and start over" once we're well in to the development lifecycle.
Bank transfer? No. Check? No. Other method no? Just a 1990s style card without CVV verification.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/12/aws-inc-c...
The reason I haven't messed with it in 2 years is because the personal project I'm working on (an indie MMO) was put on the back burner. However, my "real job" has asked me to set up some VM dev boxes that we could remote into. They were the ones that wanted Azure, which lead me down the road of trying to set up some boxes on my old account.
When I couldn't, the autist in me wasn't able to just shrug and move on, so I spent the better part of the day trying to "get it to work" when I don't explicitly NEED it for this particular project.
But this entire process has now given me a solid argument to have them switch vendors.
As for myself? I'm done with Azure entirely after today.
It's like Microsoft PURPOSELY wants to weed out any customers that may actually care about their incompetence.
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.
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.
I hope you get this resolved. Good luck
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.
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 ...
I'm going to go back to the client tomorrow and give them a breakdown of everything it's taken to get a human on the phone, and ultimately, THEIR suggestion (Microsoft's) was to "create a new account and start over".
The fact that that's even in their vocabulary tells me this is absolutely the wrong company to go with. Not only is it near impossible to get help, but when you do, they tell you to start over? How is that tenable for an application or product?