16 ms·

Microsoft: You need to fix your Skype and Microsoft account issues, this is insane

544 points by kolemcrae 9y ago

mnm1 9y ago
Skype accounts are fucked. Try signing in on Skype for Linux with two different accounts. If you're lucky, you'll experience the contact shuffle where some contacts are moved from one account to another and others randomly deleted from both accounts. I mostly stopped using Skype after that one.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- snailmailman 9y ago
  On my personal laptop, Skype forced me to update to the "new" skype version that's styled like the windows 10 one. I could no longer log into the old one. This new one is objectively worse. + chat history seems to work + dark mode - no cross platform video calling (except to web) - way less settings (like notification configuration stuff, all sorts of settings) The only thing I really use skype for is skyping to family members. Now I can't do that, because cross platform video doesn't work. The old skype worked and had more features and settings! Why force me to switch when the new version isn't feature-complete!
deleted 9y ago
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viggity 9y ago
Microsoft's accounts are just managed horribly in general. I've got two microsoft accounts for work and one for personal. The personal one I separate out by having a different chrome profile. However, for work, I have to wrestle with the login screen for about 6 iterations everytime I want a new tab. I use one MS account for azure, another for office 365. Regardless of which one I enter/select, it always prompts me for the password for the other account. Drives me effing nuts. Plus that whol "is this a business account or a personal account" selection. jesus. so frustrating.
- douche 9y ago
  You've basically got to commit to using different browsers for different accounts.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
    Or chrome profiles.
- DrPhish 9y ago
  That drives me insane as well. I expect it is nessecary in some fashion, but the implementation is severely frustrating. It should be "sticky" and allow you to switch if required. Also the personal accounts can only have 16 character max passwords, so my normal wetware password generation algorithms don't work
  - hpshelton 9y ago
    When was the last time you tried to change your password? Long password support has been live for a long time.
jvagner 9y ago
Yes.. I have a similar tale of woe. I'd like to change the username of my basic Skype account. Alas, it has the company name I worked for at the time. I also have some credits in that account. I'd either like my credits back, or I'd like to change my Skype username. Neither are possible. I'd also like Microsoft to stop asking me if I'm using a business account, or a personal account, when I enter my work email address into every Microsoft service we use every day. That'd be nifty, too.
badthingfactory 9y ago
It looks like [email] is used with more than one account. Which account do you want to use? - Work or school account - Personal account I get this prompt every time I try to log into Azure with my work email. If I choose the work account (the most intuitive option) my azure subscription list is empty. I have to log out and select the other option. Why is there a difference and why isn't this transparent? I am authenticated, you know who I am, give me access to the things I'm authorized for. I don't know what kind of weird backend situation MS has, but asking me to understand it is terrible UX.
- gnud 9y ago
  As I understand it, the work account is actually tied to your company's office 365 subscription or something like that. The private account is the one created by you. If anyone knows the exact difference, please explain! Would be greatly appreciated.
  - badthingfactory 9y ago
    That's a nice theory, but we don't have office 365 and I didn't create the account haha.
    - gnud 9y ago
      The 'non-company' account is created manually by signing up for a new microsoft account and then clicking the activation link in the email you receive. The school/work account is somehow created by a company administrator, but I don't know exactly how or where.
      - badthingfactory 9y ago
        This sounds right. So this prompt is essentially asking me to tell them which buttons my boss pressed when he created my account.
  - pionar 9y ago
    Work or school is a federated option, using ADFS to do the authentication using your company's Active Directory info. If you choose that, when you enter your work email address, it'll redirect you to your company's ADFS login page. It's used a lot with Azure AD.
dboreham 9y ago
Mine: Corporate account, used for Windows logon Skype personal account XBox account because they made me make one when my kids were young A second personal account used for something I forget. Posting on MS help fora possibly. Mind you I have three active Google accounts.
maxfurman 9y ago
This is bad, and I'm not letting Microsoft off the hook here. But, there's an easy workaround for this particular case: Use an alias, such as myrealemail+msft@example.com, for the new account.
- raisedbyninjas 9y ago
  Just tested, My office 365 account bounces for this type of address.
  - tankenmate 9y ago
    This is why I use Postfix and Cyrus for my personal mail. I get Postfix to pre-parse transform the '-' char to '+'; this way I can use email addresses that stupid systems don't barf at but can still get mail delivered to the right mailbox (including sub mailbox if it exists). e.g. me-junk@mydomain.tld goes directly to my junk mail box :)
    - tankenmate 9y ago
      I should have mentioned in the previous post, recipient_canonical_maps is probably what you are looking for. Depending, trivial_rewrite might also fit your use case depending on how early into the delivery process you want the addresses to be rewritten.
MS_Buys_Upvotes 9y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5jg8y6/fyi_criminals_are_still_attempting_to_use/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5jg8y6/fyi_crimin... Reddit discusses hackers using weak Skype credentials to access other MS accounts and bypass 2FA
- Markoff 9y ago
  thanks for this, i couldn't figure out months ago how could be my Microsoft account compromised despite using 2FA, seem after this hack and resetting all of my security settings they removed ability to sign in with old Skype account since when i went to check it now it was already unchecked though i still see in recent activity unsuccessful attempts for IMAP synchronization from all over world, not sure if they are trying to use some old app password, which i reset after discovering have
douche 9y ago
I've got at least three different Microsoft accounts with the same email address. Supposedly there's a way to link them, so that this becomes less of a clusterfuck, but I've never been able to make that work. So it's just this big mishmash of resources associated more or less at random between these different accounts. It's russian roulette every time I try to login to something that's authenticated with Microsoft accounts, and trying to remember which login I need to use to access which resources is more than I can keep track of, across outlook, MSDN, forums, Azure, Active Directory, etc, etc.
merb 9y ago
* and Office 365 Business Accounts vs Microsoft Accounts and make all of it linkable.
zamalek 9y ago
By ways of some bad choices I wound up with 3 Microsoft accounts. I never knew which services were on each. In addition to those 3 accounts, I had 2 Office accounts (one for work, one personal). Notwithstanding that the O365 sign in really can't handle two accounts on the same browser (by ways of automatic redirects) - I didn't know if services were on O365 or Live. MSDN and VSTS do not support O365 login, so I had to tell my Live account to claim my MSDN keys. It's nuts. I eventually just forget about accounts. I stopped using O365 for personal email. Don't use O365 for anything personal, you will pay hell for it (for more reasons than merely sign in).
kayoone 9y ago
this is not even touching on the security issues that arise from the fact skype does not support 2FA and the merged legacy accounts remain vulnerable.
- devereaux 9y ago
  What do you mean? If you have a outlook.com email, a merged a legacy skype account, and 2FA, what is the attack method that can be used against you?
  - thewavelength 9y ago
    As of my knowledge, you can log in to Skype without 2FA using an outlook.com-email-address even though it has 2FA enabled.
    - hpshelton 9y ago
      If you have proof of a repro for this, please reach out to our security team(s), but to the best of my knowledge this is false. 2FA works on both regular and merged Skype and Microsoft Accounts on all endpoints.
- hpshelton 9y ago
  You can disable login from secondary emails, recovery emails, your phone number, etc. using https://account.live.com/SignInPreferences https://account.live.com/SignInPreferences.
kazinator 9y ago
Skype no longer works on my wife's Windows 7 laptop. The latest update was pushed without being accompanied by the new MSVC DLL's that it needs, and so doesn't start. I haven't been able to install the redistributable run-time separately, and so it is in a foobared state.
- kolemcrae 9y ago
  Oh man, mine too! I have to use the web app!
teekert 9y ago
Try using Skype for business... Your chat history is gone when you switch to another app and is not even saved on a PC. It's always the question if a chat ends up on your laptop of mobile. You frequently miss chats or have a "you missed a chat" email, even though you were logged in. It is an insanely poor product. I guess it's not where their focus is. It could easily be a Slack alternative except that it is so bad.
- strictnein 9y ago
  > "Try using Skype for business... Your chat history is gone when you switch to another app and is not even saved on a PC." Assuming you're in a corp environment, that's likely an IT decision, not a MS one. If you go to Options -> Personal there are two checkboxes for saving IM conversations and call logs in your Conversation History folder in Outlook. Mine are grayed out because IT decided to disable them (I'm sure to meet some corp requirement).
  - basch 9y ago
    you cant bounce back and forth between the mobile app and your desktop chat and the web chat without some of the clients not getting all the messages. its the exact opposite of facebook messenger. if i start a conversation on my pc, i should be able to continue it on my phone and walk away, and see what i said on my pc when i get back.
  - tarlinian 9y ago
    Our IT has done this as well...I'm told there are privacy requirements in Germany that equate logging chat history to eavesdropping on phone conversations, so it's illegal to log chat histories. This is insanely annoying since it's easy to accidentally close an active chat window and once the window's closed, the history is permanently gone.
    - strictnein 9y ago
      I also work for a German company, so that my explain it for me as well.
okreallywtf 9y ago
Looking into active directory based features in Azure (key vault, etc) convinces me that somehow active directory is to blame for a lot of the confusing account issues around Azure. I get the feeling a lot of the microsoft authentication systems are built on top of active directory, which does not seem like the most straightforward auth system out there.
iamthepieman 9y ago
I love that I can't sign up for Azure services because i need a "real" phone number and no, VOIP numbers like google voice, Microsoft's own Skype or even my actually land line (which is through my ISP and apparently classified as VOIP) won't work. I don't have a mobile phone so that's fine, I can get texts on Google Hangouts or Skype but their account software refuses to send the verification texts to those numbers. Fortunately there's an option to have them call you but they refuse to send call my home phone system that is registered with my name and that is a valid e911 number associated with an e911 address. A call with a Microsoft support person confirmed that nope, I can not sign up for Azure.
- Neliquat 9y ago
  How dare you try to be a customer without complying to their idea of technical social norms. Shame. /s
- j_s 9y ago
  This may be enough (receive SMS without a phone) if you're desperate for Azure or other account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13631724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13631724
  - iamthepieman 9y ago
    that's the problem, every site I tried failed their "is this a real phone" check including their own service and the phone that nearly any normal person, technical or otherwise would consider a "land line"
    - j_s 9y ago
      If that's true for this specific site I'm sure the proprietor would appreciate a heads-up!
mschuster91 9y ago
Android still does not support logging in with accounts created by signing in with Facebook, despite dozens of support threads and complaints... in case anyone at MS reads this, it sucks.
- Neliquat 9y ago
  Why on earth would you want to sign on using facebook? Not saying this isnt a bug, but what is the use case sceneraio?
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    Single sign-on. It's really nice to NOT have to copy-paste usernames and passwords from password managers into native apps but use a simple "sign in with FB/Twitter" and it's done. 1 second with a decent internet connection vs 60+s for switching to Keepass, entering the wallet password, actually finding the password, copying the username, switching back to $app, pasting the username, switching back to Keepass, hope it didn't for some reason decide to randomly lock, copy the password, switch back to $app, hope it didn't forget the username in the meantime... edit: it becomes a special annoyance when an app decides to lock you out after n days (n usually = 30). Great from a security POV but hell is that annoying if it happens to multiple apps at once on a day. Or when you have 20+ apps with unique logins when you reset your phone... as login credentials/tokens are (rightfully) not cloud synced. Android desperately needs a password-autocomplete API, secured by e.g. the fingerprint sensor found on new-ish Samsung devices.
stretchwithme 9y ago
Don't get me started. I once subscribed to Office and am pretty sure I had to supply my first and last name once if not multiple times. But the final confirmation email still started with "Dear null null".
- arkitaip 9y ago
  Serves you right, little Bobby Tables.
deleted 9y ago
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gwicks56 9y ago
Managing accounts is a massive problem everywhere. I recently moved from Australia to the USA, and I have been having this problem ad-nauseam. Try switching your Google developer account to a US bank, or your amazon, paypal or god knows how many others. I accidentally put skype credits on the wrong skype account, and was hoping to be able to merge accounts somehow, but ending up just deciding it wasn't worth the $20.
- beerbajay 9y ago
  I lived in the US, got a paypal account, all good. Moved to sweden, updated address + bank info, still ok. Moved back to USA, now: "You cannot change your country of residence. If you have moved open a new paypal account". WTF? This is a paypal account I've had since the early 2000's.
  - gwicks56 9y ago
    Yeah I had to basically set up new Ebay and paypal accounts, which is a pain, because you go from having 100's on good reviews as a buyer and seller to having none. It's a hard problem, in some a ways a universal internet ID would make life so much easier, but it would also make tyranny much easier.
philliphaydon 9y ago
As much as I dislike Google services. Their account stuff just works. For everything they create. It just works. I love MS stuff, but they have the worst account process ever, closely followed by Apple. I do wish MS would sort their act out in regards to accounts. I lost my Xbox account trying to transfer my games and such between my windows live account and an old account. Lost my games and points and credits :(
- jevogel 9y ago
  I once lost my Xbox Live account because I deleted the associated Hotmail address that I never used. I didn't realize it until the attached credit card expired years later. I went to update the card info on the website and couldn't get on due to the non-existent email address. Spent hours with customer service over multiple calls and no one was able to link the account to a different email address or add a new credit card for me. Just insane.
- orbitingpluto 9y ago
  Not entirely true. I've seen issues with Google's G Suite / Google Apps for Work and Google+. Things like your co-workers avatar being displayed instead of your own.
chrisper 9y ago
Yes, they need to fix a lot of things. Also if you use Onedrive online, you are automatically logged into Skype every time you use onedrive. You cannot log out. You can set yourself invisible, but you will be set back to online next time you log in again. It is ridiculous. Another point is that you cannot use a "work account" you use in office365 as your personal account for OneDrive etc.
robertlf 9y ago
C'mon folks, this is Microsoft you're talking about. They put the 'ame' in lame. Why would you expect more?
jordache 9y ago
My Skype account was temporarily hacked at one point, to the extend that it got disabled it. I still have access to the email associated with my Skype account. I've talked to MS support on this already but for whatever reason, they can't validate my identity to the extend that I can reset the password on that skype ID. Their only solution was for me to create a new Skype account. What other cloud service does not allow reset of account via e-mail validation!? What a cluster MSFT EDIT: And guess what, I have not used Skype since. Trying to recreate my contacts and the whole process of having family accept my new account was a much larger barrier than just instructing my family to use another video chat service. FU MSFT.
- deleted 9y ago
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bflesch 9y ago
I was hit by this issue a couple of days ago and suddenly I needed to use my old Skype login but the password of my second microsoft account.
digitalmaster 9y ago
Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
s_kilk 9y ago
I wonder how many different Auth systems Microsoft has created/subsumed/whatever over the years. It'd be cool too see a graphic of all those services and how they have merged, or in what way they are layered currently.
_alexander 9y ago
Here is a fun one. If you use the wrong email address for a password reset, Skype will create a skype user name and account linked to your email address. You will not be able to delete the Skype account. Yeah, fuck you Microsoft.
- ralphie02 9y ago
  that's a pretty shitty bug on their end. Now you've fucked two accounts, brilliant
StreamBright 9y ago
I was running into the exact same issue. I am hoping that some product can challenge Skype and replace it entirely. It would be better at this stage.
wslh 9y ago
If I were Satya Nadella I would fire top Skype executives first, cannot believe how a rational company can destroy this brand. Full stop.
legohead 9y ago
Funny to see this thread after what's happening to me today. I need to get access to my Microsoft Office online documents. I go to login and it has me do a security check with my email: microsoft@mydomain.com. It's supposed to send a code to verify my email, but I never get it. So I try option 2, a different email: microsoft@myotherdomain.com. Never get the code... Hmm, does it not like the word microsoft? So I try myname@mydomain.com, and I get the code! Although now I have to answer a bunch of questions and my account is under review -- I should get an answer within 24 hours. But what about the future? My real account is still microsoft@mydomain.com. Will this keep happening? :\
ArmandGrillet 9y ago
Microsoft truly sucks with account management. Here is what happened to me with Microsoft Office last week: - My Office University account expires. - My father invites me to be part of his Office 365 Family subscription (it includes 5 accounts). - I click on the "Get the invite" button on the email I have received and... "You already have an active account". There was no way from the website to cancel my expired University account, the only available option was to subscribe to my own Office 365 Personal account (€10/month). I have contacted Microsoft and it took 90 minutes of chat, including a one hour session where a Microsoft support guy took control of my computer (it was totally useless, the error has been solved by a modification in the Microsoft account database), to fix the issue. As titled here: this is insane.
- sashk 9y ago
  I had similiar problem. I called them, got to the real person, who fixed issue within 2 minutes. Total call time was about 5 minutes. That included time, I was searching for invite and so on.
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    So basically you can be lucky - or not. IIRC my boss wasted a few hours on the phone with two MS employees - spread over a week or two because their accounting and customer service teams couldn't speak together it seems. I however was lucky, some tool I had bought was missing from my Windows Store account, after contacting them they contacted me back and I had it fixed within 20 minutes or something.
bsg75 9y ago
> Let me change my Skype username. What the hell, this is just obvious. The number of services that don't allow this is also insane. Its as if they use the username itself as a key, rather than one that is masked from the user allowing such changes.
josteink 9y ago
This thing singlehandedly made me ditch Skype. I didn't know which my login were and it was random which contacts I would see and which contacts were able to message me at all. I just gave up on it and never looked back.
bpicolo 9y ago
Google drive also has extremely frustrating multi-login issues. It frequently forces me to log out of all accounts in order to correctly access drive on a specific one. It's entirely random whether it works or not. It's just infuriating.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  This drives me crazy. My business partner insists on using Google Drive. So I go along with it. But not being allowed to access my Drive while being logged into other Google accounts is so annoying.
  - retromario 9y ago
    I'm not saying it's a solution, but as a workaround for similar situations it can help to use two browsers, one for each account.
    - jordanthoms 9y ago
      Yeah, the best solution here is to use multiple chrome profiles with one for each account. Google's multiple sign-in is incredibly buggy and is a huge pain when integrating with their oauth APIs
inopinatus 9y ago
To some extent I think this is a user category error. Similarly, one of my platform's most frequent support requests is account recovery due to a change of employment. The number of people who use their work email for personal accounts, without thinking about the long-term consequences, is staggering. Protip, don't name anything expecting you can change it later. See also: S3 buckets.
- kolemcrae 9y ago
  Or, you know, let us unlink accounts or change the username, two pretty normal and reasonable things to request.
  - inopinatus 9y ago
    There's nothing that makes either reasonable, other than "I demand it".
oregontechninja 9y ago
I stopped using Skype forever ago, the service just turned to crap. Facebook video calls are easier at this point.
mevile 9y ago
Microsoft should fix this, but I have learned to never link my personal accounts with work accounts after the Dropbox enterprise debacle that led to users losing their personal files! after having their Dropbox linked to enterprise Dropbox and then leaving the company. These situations where you mix personal and enterprise/job accounts become edge cases that can be catastrophic for users stuck in them after they leave companies.
ianmcgowan 9y ago
Google used to be pretty bad at this too, but they seem to have their act together these days. It's not an easy problem. But yeah, when I go to use a Microsoft service online it's always a crapshoot, and certain products require either a personal account or a work account. Syncing OneNote is a confusing mess because of this. And don't get me started on Lync/Skype for Business...
- orionblastar 9y ago
  It is not always easy to do a good quality control when they downsize their best people and hire people willing to work for less money but a lower quality. Back in the 1990s I worked as a tech and programmer. I issued bug reports to Microsoft and they would fix them in the next service pack or version. But in doing so they'd change the Windows API calls which broke my Visual Basic programs. I had the Dan Appleman book on API calles but had to surf the net for the changes made to them on Microsoft blogs for developers or Yahoo Clubs on programming, etc. Everytime they made a book, it was outdated as soon as it was published.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Still have a couple of the Microsoft Developer Network t-shirts they mailed to you for reporting bugs in Visual C++/MSDN. I can remember having an issue with a Windows API call in the 90's and having to go on usenet to find someone who knew where to download an example program that Microsoft inexplicably removed from subsequent MSDN CDs.
__jal 9y ago
Shit like this is why I don't use anything from them. There are probably 15 or so different accounts for me in their DBs, which I will never even attempt to use again. Life is too short to put up with managing other people's CRM for them. Apple is actually getting close to this bad, too, and in some ways, worse. I gave my mother my old iPhone over a year ago. It was wiped, and we set it up with the 'family' whatsit. For reasons I won't go in to, at some point, I ended up giving her my Apple ID password to fix a problem when I couldn't do it. Ever since then, something has periodically decided to sync a random assortment of things. It isn't consistent, temporally or in terms of what it syncs. (I'm very anti-cloud-service; I don't use online backup, sync or cloud docs or any other sync services from Apple. I think my other uses the backup, but nothing else, because the phone is her only Apple device.) A few months ago, her contacts ended up splattered all over mine. I deleted them, it happened again a few days later, this time just a random assortment of them. Yesterday, my call logs ended up on her phone. Short of asking her to wipe the phone again, I don't know how to make this crap stop, but I'm sick of it. Seriously considering going back to a feature phone; everyone making modern phones appear to (a) make it impossible to have a self-contained phone without your personal life smeared across multiple companies' servers, and (b) be too incompetent to actually smear my personal life across their servers without fucking it up.
- Frondo 9y ago
  "For reasons I won't go in to, at some point, I ended up giving her my Apple ID password to fix a problem when I couldn't do it." I won't ask about the reasons, but it seems like everything in your email is a consequence of you setting up someone else's phone to use your account information. Sure, going to a feature phone would solve that, but so would not actually sharing your account with someone else. What else did you expect? In other words, how could Apple differentiate between "it's my account but not my phone" and "it's my account and it is my phone"?
  - __jal 9y ago
    > In other words, how could Apple differentiate between "it's my account but not my phone" and "it's my account and it is my phone"? Because the phone in question used that Apple id precisely once, and is now configured with hers? There's obviously some foreign key floating around keeping the association, even though it should not be there. And that's ignoring the question of why and how, when syncing, backup, etc is turned off, my phone logs are even being sent to Apple at all, let alone leaked through to another phone? Same question with contacts - if I am not syncing or backing up, why does Apple grab my contacts? > What else did you expect? I expect, when logging in to a device with a given account, to only have access to things associated with that account. I also expect, when configuring something to not share data, that it not share data. Do you really have different expectations?
swamplander 9y ago
Similar hate post coming from me soon. I have an MSA & Office 365 (Azure AD) login using the same email. I use my MSA to login to my Surface, but now, all the sudden, I can't setup Outlook to connect to my O365 email. Their solution: rename your MSA. My response "no freaking way... no telling how much stuff that's going to break as I've used that MSA for over a decade". And then I read your post today... I'm glad I closed my Surface and went back to my MacBook last night... Ref: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Outlook/Can-t-connect-Outlook-2016-to-my-O365-Mailbox/m-p/63421#M555 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Outlook/Can-t-connect...
caconym_ 9y ago
I have two or maybe one Microsoft account(s). It's impossible to tell because I seem to have made two accounts that some parts of their systems think are the same, and other parts think are different. My theory is that I was a victim of some sort of migration bug at some point because I have had at least one account for a very long time (probably since Halo 2 for that online multiplayer). This problem makes it impossible to update relevant details on either account, IIRC. Their support is the worst; they were totally unable to even comprehend the problem I was seeing, let alone fix it. I just gave up trying to use them.
jakebasile 9y ago
Allowing username changes should be basic functionality in any system that has usernames. People change, names change, and so on.
- jackvalentine 9y ago
  And if you want to avoid abuse rate limit it to one change every 3 months, or $10 per change or SOMETHING.
franciscop 9y ago
I have been using Hotmail and Skype since the old days, but now my Skype (on Linux, mind you) is totally unusable and the Outlook online abomination is becoming WORSE every day. I just noticed today that they added a DOOOONG sound to the "webapp", but then when I open it nothing happened. It was a message in the "Others" recently added tab (not a folder, not spam, somewhere in the middle but physically in a totally different place). I love the "Done" action from Inbox (Google) as it's a perfect categorization. So I'm migrating everything to Inbox (Gmail) and people don't care at all switching to Hangouts instead of Skype.
twakefield 9y ago
My skype account was hacked (who's wasn't?) a few months ago. I tried to access it to change the password but in the process I was forced to link it some other Microsoft account that I didn't even know I had. It took me half the day to recover my original passwords then reset them. Now to get to Skype (if I'm logged out) I have to log into some Microsoft cloud identity thing. All for a service (skype) I rarely use.
ska 9y ago
The whole MS account management is a hot mess. I'm currently dealing with an issue with different versions of the same (MS) software getting authenticated via a domain but ending up pointing at two different MS accounts associated with the same email address, and hence consuming two licenses. 2 weeks of "support" back and forth hasn't helped, they seem to have good tooling to introspect what is happening.
BadassFractal 9y ago
I try to avoid using Skype if I can, it feels unloved, like it's barely hanging together.
trevyn 9y ago
Or just stop using Microsoft products? It's been pretty clear to me since about 1985 that other companies make equivalent products that tend to be more powerful and more pleasant to use. Your time and mental state are valuable!
- orionblastar 9y ago
  That is why people stuck to Wordperfect and Lotus Smartsuite bundles instead of Microsoft Office. Until new versions of Windows broke the third party office apps. GRR Martin still uses Wordstar in a DOS machine because he doesn't trust Windows to not crash or reboot on him and lose his data. Problem is the Microsoft tax on Intel or AMD PCs that OEMs have to pay even if they don't install Windows or Office. But now Office 2016 is installed but user needs to buy a key to use it for activation. I suggest that people use Libreoffice because it can read docx files etc.
justin66 9y ago
Merging a work account to a personal account just seems like a stupid thing to do to begin with. No good could have come of this.
- kolemcrae 9y ago
  I don't remember merging them. It must have happened years and years ago. I haven't worked for that company in a VERY long time.
stagbeetle 9y ago
Wooh, am I glad I'm not the only one experiencing account problems. An event I'm going to requires a Skype account of a preliminary interview. So I go to sign up with my gmail, and I'm able to create an account. However, I already had a Skype account through MS's weird Outlook program (I signed up with my gmail for Outlook, and it automatically created a Skype account without telling me . . . for the gmail account). This bricks both accounts by loading to an error page when I login, telling me to go to MS's website to fix my account. I go there and then after spelunking through the maze of a UI, finally get to a page that tells me I need to call Microsoft to diagnosis the problem. Screw that noise. It's 2017, this is archaic. Luckily, there's a third option for signing up and that's through a phone number. I do that, but now I don't know what to enter for the username field in my interview app. I look through Skype's help docs, and it doesn't say anything about phone numbers. I assumed my phone number is my username and that's how people can add me. Anyway, that's what I put in the app and I'm hoping that the UN acts like a UN and not a phone number with calling charges. What a mess. It's also partly the event's fault for using Skype when better alternatives exist.
Zekio 9y ago
TL;DR: impossible to delete old skype accounts without knowing EVERYTHING about it. I have like 3 old skype accounts which shows up with my name which I can't access due to me not having the email addresses anymore nor do I remember the passwords, so it is a pain when people try to add me on skype and I contacted them and asked if they could delete my old accounts since I can't access them and they said that is not possible since I don't remember all the security questions and answers, wouldn't even give me the questions so I could have a chance at answering them.. Edit: added TL;DR
ikeboy 9y ago
Any good way to search all my Skype chats? Or download complete history to a file?
Kenji 9y ago
Trust me, the Xbox accounts aren't much better. It is painful. I generally avoid Microsoft accounts like the plague.
jondiggsit 9y ago
I switched my (small) business back to running on Microsoft products like Office 365 and the account issues with my employees are driving me INSANE.
tostitos1979 9y ago
Had to deal with Windows/Skype/Office login issues for a senior. It is insane that people who pirate have an easier time than paying customers.
- i336_ 9y ago
  Not necessarily looking to go in the direction you mention, but I'm curious what you mean nonetheless - AFAIK, Skype's consumer/personal offering is free, and then you need to subscribe for business accounts because that all runs on microsoft servers. Are you referring to a different product, or are there copies of old enterprise skype server systems floating around out there?
  - tostitos1979 9y ago
    This person had Skype credits and some calling plan. Very consumer level :)
    - i336_ 9y ago
      Sorry - I think there's been a misunderstanding. I was referring to the context you mentioned in the latter half of your comment, and the supporting circumstances for that. (In other words, I'm not aware of any way Skype can be pirated, and I'm not particularly aware of any, err, accessible commercial alternatives.)
tatersolid 9y ago
My corp can't use Azure. We really want to, we're mostly a MSFT shop that runs a largish SaaS application. But Microsoft automatically linked the organizational Azure account for our corporate internet domain to the personal account of an ops guy because of some cookie being present when he created the organizational Azure account. After six months of support calls MSFT cannot get it unscrewed. We're spending 50k USD per month with another cloud provider, and want to move to Azure to take advantage of SQL Azure and MSDN credits. But their screwed up account management system is losing them this revenue.
dvtv75 9y ago
I recently upgraded my Linux PC, and had to reinstall Skype. So I sign in to the new Skype, and can't remember my password. That's OK, I'll just get them to reset it. Oh, my email address expired while my PC was sitting on the junk heap? That's OK, I'll follow their prompts, this shouldn't be too difficult. "Unfortunately, we were unable to verify your ownership of this account using the information you provided. [...] Please submit a new account verification form At this point, your best option is to submit a new form with as much accurate information as you can gather." I've provided the details of six different users who were on my contact list, the complete email address I used to use, and there is nothing else I can do. No email address I can contact, no phone number to ring. Oh, and most importantly, there's no "Import old account settings" option. Screw you, Microsoft.
jackvalentine 9y ago
I got caught by another Skype issue - merged my long-time Skype account with my MS account. Old skype account - kinda bad password. MS account - great password, 2FA. Then I got alerts that someone in China had logged in to my MS account. I couldn't figure out how they'd done this until... I figured out they'd signed in to skype, using my old skype username and old skype password that were still valid for some unknown reason after merging it in to my far more secure MS account.
- ap46 9y ago
  It wasn't manually hacked, there's someone out there running a program to brute force known Skype usernames & spreading spam & confirming more Skype usernames. Alphanumeric password upto 9digits are not safe absolutely.
  - jackvalentine 9y ago
    Well of course
red023 9y ago
People: You need to quit your usage of M$ products and services, this is insane.
lavalampkid 9y ago
I hope someone out there @ Skype or Microsoft sees this and puts it in front of the right people...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
richev 9y ago
The real fun starts if you need to change the email address associated with your Microsoft account. Six months and multiple support calls later and I'm still receiving Azure billing information and Xbox newsletters at the old address.
gambiting 9y ago
Ever since Lync(corporate IM system) got merged into Skype so that now it's just "skype for business" it's atrocious, easily the worst application I have on my PC. If someone goes offline, Skype will show you how long they have been offline for. Except....that it's just a random number. I can set my status to offline right now, and my coworker will see that I've been offline for.....168 days. Or 700 days. Or 35 minutes. Microsoft knew about this bug for years, and there is no fix for it. Frequently, when I send messages to my coworkers, they appear ABOVE older messages in the coversation, which is extremely confusing, because obviously the whole window will flash to indicate you got a new message, but in reality you have to scroll up to actually see it. Highlighting text is just broken, I dare anyone from MS to reliably highlight just a portion of text without the selection jumping to seemingly random part of the window without any indication how or why. Arbitrarily low character limit, so you can't paste snippets of code. During conference calls, audio just dies from time to time, and the only thing you can do about it is kill the conversation and start again. This is a product based off Skype, for fucks sake, that MS is charging us millions of dollars for globally, and that doesn't even have the basic functionality working correctly.
- douche 9y ago
  The Skype for Business client is still essentially the same as when it was Lync 2013. In the early days of the rebranding, the version number had only jumped a couple dozen revision numbers, keeping the same major and minor versions, and still calling itself Lync 2013 on the about dialog. Changes on the server-side have been even less drastic. Consumer Skype is still an entirely separate code base. The two IM platforms don't even speak the same protocol, and just barely interoperate. The naming change is illogical as all hell, but Microsoft bought Skype, and suddenly Lync needed to be rebranded under the Skype umbrella. Before it was Lync, it was Office Communicator, before that Live Communicator, and before that, I believe went under an MSN name. It's always been hitched to the latest marketing bandwagon. Lync/S4B is, sadly, one of the better enterprise IM systems, in comparison to other big players in that space, like Sametime, Jabber or Hipchat. It's still hot garbage.
Sami_Lehtinen 9y ago
Outlook doesn't validate email addresses correctly. Their validation is a complete failure. Even # isn't allowed in addresses. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.4 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.4
shinamee 9y ago
I should have raised this issue long time ago but why should I do so, after all its not like they're paying me to fix their shits. I basically moved from Skype to Zoom.us with all my clients
yazbo_mcclure 9y ago
Surface tech support messed me up with this as well. Somehow my personal email which I only never use and made to get minecraft for 10 that I will never play was getting all the emails about my bad dock. I feel bad when I deal with Microsoft it's a bad feeling I wish I didn't have to stay with Microsoft I would leave but where would I go? I'm to old to start over and the kids what about the children?
turc1656 9y ago
I am also having a Microsoft account issue that is similar to this. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oaccount-ocloseacc/problem-between-work-and-personal-accounts/38eae1e5-5ba9-4eb8-9c88-de9ac88b841a?tm=1489679818866&auth=1 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oaccou... Difference for me is that I have no idea how the work account was created. I do an have Office365 account from my employer but we just recently switched and I had this problem before that account was created. Also, that Office365 account is linked to my actual work email. The problem I am experiencing is a "work" account that was mysteriously created on my personal email and it makes no sense. Over a month and no one has responded. Anyone here have any ideas?
VSerge 9y ago
Skype also has a knack for randomly asking you to input a security code that it'll text or call you with, except... When I have recently needed to do it, I got 0 call or text. The email Skype offers to send a code to, in my case, isn't the email associated with the account but some old email that no longer exists (old recovery email I think). So I'm effectively locked out of my account on any new device for the time being, and getting zero feedback when reaching out to customer support. It is a maddeningly bad user experience, and I cannot believe a company like microsoft would let such crippling bugs exist on such widely distributed products.
ap46 9y ago
Someone has been successfully running brute forced attempts at login into accounts & spreading/amassing valid usernames & attempting brute force logins on them like a pyramid. My password of alphanumeric password of 9 digits got cracked & Skype fucking sent spam to everyone & now is most likely attempting to brute force their accounts as well.....they can't even implement a rate limiter for the logins against an IP.

544 points by kolemcrae 9y ago

mnm1 9y ago

Skype accounts are fucked. Try signing in on Skype for Linux with two different accounts. If you're lucky, you'll experience the contact shuffle where some contacts are moved from one account to another and others randomly deleted from both accounts. I mostly stopped using Skype after that one.

deleted 9y ago
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snailmailman 9y ago
On my personal laptop, Skype forced me to update to the "new" skype version that's styled like the windows 10 one. I could no longer log into the old one. This new one is objectively worse. + chat history seems to work + dark mode - no cross platform video calling (except to web) - way less settings (like notification configuration stuff, all sorts of settings) The only thing I really use skype for is skyping to family members. Now I can't do that, because cross platform video doesn't work. The old skype worked and had more features and settings! Why force me to switch when the new version isn't feature-complete!

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

viggity 9y ago

Microsoft's accounts are just managed horribly in general. I've got two microsoft accounts for work and one for personal. The personal one I separate out by having a different chrome profile. However, for work, I have to wrestle with the login screen for about 6 iterations everytime I want a new tab. I use one MS account for azure, another for office 365. Regardless of which one I enter/select, it always prompts me for the password for the other account. Drives me effing nuts. Plus that whol "is this a business account or a personal account" selection. jesus. so frustrating.

douche 9y ago
You've basically got to commit to using different browsers for different accounts.
- fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
  Or chrome profiles.
DrPhish 9y ago
That drives me insane as well. I expect it is nessecary in some fashion, but the implementation is severely frustrating. It should be "sticky" and allow you to switch if required. Also the personal accounts can only have 16 character max passwords, so my normal wetware password generation algorithms don't work
- hpshelton 9y ago
  When was the last time you tried to change your password? Long password support has been live for a long time.

jvagner 9y ago

Yes.. I have a similar tale of woe. I'd like to change the username of my basic Skype account. Alas, it has the company name I worked for at the time. I also have some credits in that account. I'd either like my credits back, or I'd like to change my Skype username. Neither are possible. I'd also like Microsoft to stop asking me if I'm using a business account, or a personal account, when I enter my work email address into every Microsoft service we use every day. That'd be nifty, too.

badthingfactory 9y ago

It looks like [email] is used with more than one account. Which account do you want to use? - Work or school account - Personal account I get this prompt every time I try to log into Azure with my work email. If I choose the work account (the most intuitive option) my azure subscription list is empty. I have to log out and select the other option. Why is there a difference and why isn't this transparent? I am authenticated, you know who I am, give me access to the things I'm authorized for. I don't know what kind of weird backend situation MS has, but asking me to understand it is terrible UX.

gnud 9y ago
As I understand it, the work account is actually tied to your company's office 365 subscription or something like that. The private account is the one created by you. If anyone knows the exact difference, please explain! Would be greatly appreciated.
- badthingfactory 9y ago
  That's a nice theory, but we don't have office 365 and I didn't create the account haha.
  - gnud 9y ago
    The 'non-company' account is created manually by signing up for a new microsoft account and then clicking the activation link in the email you receive. The school/work account is somehow created by a company administrator, but I don't know exactly how or where.
    - badthingfactory 9y ago
      This sounds right. So this prompt is essentially asking me to tell them which buttons my boss pressed when he created my account.
- pionar 9y ago
  Work or school is a federated option, using ADFS to do the authentication using your company's Active Directory info. If you choose that, when you enter your work email address, it'll redirect you to your company's ADFS login page. It's used a lot with Azure AD.

dboreham 9y ago

Mine: Corporate account, used for Windows logon Skype personal account XBox account because they made me make one when my kids were young A second personal account used for something I forget. Posting on MS help fora possibly. Mind you I have three active Google accounts.

maxfurman 9y ago

This is bad, and I'm not letting Microsoft off the hook here. But, there's an easy workaround for this particular case: Use an alias, such as myrealemail+msft@example.com, for the new account.

raisedbyninjas 9y ago
Just tested, My office 365 account bounces for this type of address.
- tankenmate 9y ago
  This is why I use Postfix and Cyrus for my personal mail. I get Postfix to pre-parse transform the '-' char to '+'; this way I can use email addresses that stupid systems don't barf at but can still get mail delivered to the right mailbox (including sub mailbox if it exists). e.g. me-junk@mydomain.tld goes directly to my junk mail box :)
  - tankenmate 9y ago
    I should have mentioned in the previous post, recipient_canonical_maps is probably what you are looking for. Depending, trivial_rewrite might also fit your use case depending on how early into the delivery process you want the addresses to be rewritten.

MS_Buys_Upvotes 9y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5jg8y6/fyi_criminals_are_still_attempting_to_use/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5jg8y6/fyi_crimin... Reddit discusses hackers using weak Skype credentials to access other MS accounts and bypass 2FA

Markoff 9y ago
thanks for this, i couldn't figure out months ago how could be my Microsoft account compromised despite using 2FA, seem after this hack and resetting all of my security settings they removed ability to sign in with old Skype account since when i went to check it now it was already unchecked though i still see in recent activity unsuccessful attempts for IMAP synchronization from all over world, not sure if they are trying to use some old app password, which i reset after discovering have

douche 9y ago

I've got at least three different Microsoft accounts with the same email address. Supposedly there's a way to link them, so that this becomes less of a clusterfuck, but I've never been able to make that work. So it's just this big mishmash of resources associated more or less at random between these different accounts. It's russian roulette every time I try to login to something that's authenticated with Microsoft accounts, and trying to remember which login I need to use to access which resources is more than I can keep track of, across outlook, MSDN, forums, Azure, Active Directory, etc, etc.

merb 9y ago

* and Office 365 Business Accounts vs Microsoft Accounts and make all of it linkable.

zamalek 9y ago

By ways of some bad choices I wound up with 3 Microsoft accounts. I never knew which services were on each. In addition to those 3 accounts, I had 2 Office accounts (one for work, one personal). Notwithstanding that the O365 sign in really can't handle two accounts on the same browser (by ways of automatic redirects) - I didn't know if services were on O365 or Live. MSDN and VSTS do not support O365 login, so I had to tell my Live account to claim my MSDN keys. It's nuts. I eventually just forget about accounts. I stopped using O365 for personal email. Don't use O365 for anything personal, you will pay hell for it (for more reasons than merely sign in).

kayoone 9y ago

this is not even touching on the security issues that arise from the fact skype does not support 2FA and the merged legacy accounts remain vulnerable.

devereaux 9y ago
What do you mean? If you have a outlook.com email, a merged a legacy skype account, and 2FA, what is the attack method that can be used against you?
- thewavelength 9y ago
  As of my knowledge, you can log in to Skype without 2FA using an outlook.com-email-address even though it has 2FA enabled.
  - hpshelton 9y ago
    If you have proof of a repro for this, please reach out to our security team(s), but to the best of my knowledge this is false. 2FA works on both regular and merged Skype and Microsoft Accounts on all endpoints.
hpshelton 9y ago
You can disable login from secondary emails, recovery emails, your phone number, etc. using https://account.live.com/SignInPreferences https://account.live.com/SignInPreferences.

kazinator 9y ago

Skype no longer works on my wife's Windows 7 laptop. The latest update was pushed without being accompanied by the new MSVC DLL's that it needs, and so doesn't start. I haven't been able to install the redistributable run-time separately, and so it is in a foobared state.

kolemcrae 9y ago
Oh man, mine too! I have to use the web app!

teekert 9y ago

Try using Skype for business... Your chat history is gone when you switch to another app and is not even saved on a PC. It's always the question if a chat ends up on your laptop of mobile. You frequently miss chats or have a "you missed a chat" email, even though you were logged in. It is an insanely poor product. I guess it's not where their focus is. It could easily be a Slack alternative except that it is so bad.

strictnein 9y ago
> "Try using Skype for business... Your chat history is gone when you switch to another app and is not even saved on a PC." Assuming you're in a corp environment, that's likely an IT decision, not a MS one. If you go to Options -> Personal there are two checkboxes for saving IM conversations and call logs in your Conversation History folder in Outlook. Mine are grayed out because IT decided to disable them (I'm sure to meet some corp requirement).
- basch 9y ago
  you cant bounce back and forth between the mobile app and your desktop chat and the web chat without some of the clients not getting all the messages. its the exact opposite of facebook messenger. if i start a conversation on my pc, i should be able to continue it on my phone and walk away, and see what i said on my pc when i get back.
- tarlinian 9y ago
  Our IT has done this as well...I'm told there are privacy requirements in Germany that equate logging chat history to eavesdropping on phone conversations, so it's illegal to log chat histories. This is insanely annoying since it's easy to accidentally close an active chat window and once the window's closed, the history is permanently gone.
  - strictnein 9y ago
    I also work for a German company, so that my explain it for me as well.

okreallywtf 9y ago

Looking into active directory based features in Azure (key vault, etc) convinces me that somehow active directory is to blame for a lot of the confusing account issues around Azure. I get the feeling a lot of the microsoft authentication systems are built on top of active directory, which does not seem like the most straightforward auth system out there.

iamthepieman 9y ago

I love that I can't sign up for Azure services because i need a "real" phone number and no, VOIP numbers like google voice, Microsoft's own Skype or even my actually land line (which is through my ISP and apparently classified as VOIP) won't work. I don't have a mobile phone so that's fine, I can get texts on Google Hangouts or Skype but their account software refuses to send the verification texts to those numbers. Fortunately there's an option to have them call you but they refuse to send call my home phone system that is registered with my name and that is a valid e911 number associated with an e911 address. A call with a Microsoft support person confirmed that nope, I can not sign up for Azure.

Neliquat 9y ago
How dare you try to be a customer without complying to their idea of technical social norms. Shame. /s
j_s 9y ago
This may be enough (receive SMS without a phone) if you're desperate for Azure or other account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13631724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13631724
- iamthepieman 9y ago
  that's the problem, every site I tried failed their "is this a real phone" check including their own service and the phone that nearly any normal person, technical or otherwise would consider a "land line"
  - j_s 9y ago
    If that's true for this specific site I'm sure the proprietor would appreciate a heads-up!

mschuster91 9y ago

Android still does not support logging in with accounts created by signing in with Facebook, despite dozens of support threads and complaints... in case anyone at MS reads this, it sucks.

Neliquat 9y ago
Why on earth would you want to sign on using facebook? Not saying this isnt a bug, but what is the use case sceneraio?
- mschuster91 9y ago
  Single sign-on. It's really nice to NOT have to copy-paste usernames and passwords from password managers into native apps but use a simple "sign in with FB/Twitter" and it's done. 1 second with a decent internet connection vs 60+s for switching to Keepass, entering the wallet password, actually finding the password, copying the username, switching back to $app, pasting the username, switching back to Keepass, hope it didn't for some reason decide to randomly lock, copy the password, switch back to $app, hope it didn't forget the username in the meantime... edit: it becomes a special annoyance when an app decides to lock you out after n days (n usually = 30). Great from a security POV but hell is that annoying if it happens to multiple apps at once on a day. Or when you have 20+ apps with unique logins when you reset your phone... as login credentials/tokens are (rightfully) not cloud synced. Android desperately needs a password-autocomplete API, secured by e.g. the fingerprint sensor found on new-ish Samsung devices.

stretchwithme 9y ago

Don't get me started. I once subscribed to Office and am pretty sure I had to supply my first and last name once if not multiple times. But the final confirmation email still started with "Dear null null".

arkitaip 9y ago
Serves you right, little Bobby Tables.

deleted 9y ago

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gwicks56 9y ago

Managing accounts is a massive problem everywhere. I recently moved from Australia to the USA, and I have been having this problem ad-nauseam. Try switching your Google developer account to a US bank, or your amazon, paypal or god knows how many others. I accidentally put skype credits on the wrong skype account, and was hoping to be able to merge accounts somehow, but ending up just deciding it wasn't worth the $20.

beerbajay 9y ago
I lived in the US, got a paypal account, all good. Moved to sweden, updated address + bank info, still ok. Moved back to USA, now: "You cannot change your country of residence. If you have moved open a new paypal account". WTF? This is a paypal account I've had since the early 2000's.
- gwicks56 9y ago
  Yeah I had to basically set up new Ebay and paypal accounts, which is a pain, because you go from having 100's on good reviews as a buyer and seller to having none. It's a hard problem, in some a ways a universal internet ID would make life so much easier, but it would also make tyranny much easier.

philliphaydon 9y ago

As much as I dislike Google services. Their account stuff just works. For everything they create. It just works. I love MS stuff, but they have the worst account process ever, closely followed by Apple. I do wish MS would sort their act out in regards to accounts. I lost my Xbox account trying to transfer my games and such between my windows live account and an old account. Lost my games and points and credits :(

jevogel 9y ago
I once lost my Xbox Live account because I deleted the associated Hotmail address that I never used. I didn't realize it until the attached credit card expired years later. I went to update the card info on the website and couldn't get on due to the non-existent email address. Spent hours with customer service over multiple calls and no one was able to link the account to a different email address or add a new credit card for me. Just insane.
orbitingpluto 9y ago
Not entirely true. I've seen issues with Google's G Suite / Google Apps for Work and Google+. Things like your co-workers avatar being displayed instead of your own.

chrisper 9y ago

Yes, they need to fix a lot of things. Also if you use Onedrive online, you are automatically logged into Skype every time you use onedrive. You cannot log out. You can set yourself invisible, but you will be set back to online next time you log in again. It is ridiculous. Another point is that you cannot use a "work account" you use in office365 as your personal account for OneDrive etc.

robertlf 9y ago

C'mon folks, this is Microsoft you're talking about. They put the 'ame' in lame. Why would you expect more?

jordache 9y ago

My Skype account was temporarily hacked at one point, to the extend that it got disabled it. I still have access to the email associated with my Skype account. I've talked to MS support on this already but for whatever reason, they can't validate my identity to the extend that I can reset the password on that skype ID. Their only solution was for me to create a new Skype account. What other cloud service does not allow reset of account via e-mail validation!? What a cluster MSFT EDIT: And guess what, I have not used Skype since. Trying to recreate my contacts and the whole process of having family accept my new account was a much larger barrier than just instructing my family to use another video chat service. FU MSFT.

deleted 9y ago
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bflesch 9y ago

I was hit by this issue a couple of days ago and suddenly I needed to use my old Skype login but the password of my second microsoft account.

digitalmaster 9y ago

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

s_kilk 9y ago

I wonder how many different Auth systems Microsoft has created/subsumed/whatever over the years. It'd be cool too see a graphic of all those services and how they have merged, or in what way they are layered currently.

_alexander 9y ago

Here is a fun one. If you use the wrong email address for a password reset, Skype will create a skype user name and account linked to your email address. You will not be able to delete the Skype account. Yeah, fuck you Microsoft.

ralphie02 9y ago
that's a pretty shitty bug on their end. Now you've fucked two accounts, brilliant

StreamBright 9y ago

I was running into the exact same issue. I am hoping that some product can challenge Skype and replace it entirely. It would be better at this stage.

wslh 9y ago

If I were Satya Nadella I would fire top Skype executives first, cannot believe how a rational company can destroy this brand. Full stop.

legohead 9y ago

Funny to see this thread after what's happening to me today. I need to get access to my Microsoft Office online documents. I go to login and it has me do a security check with my email: microsoft@mydomain.com. It's supposed to send a code to verify my email, but I never get it. So I try option 2, a different email: microsoft@myotherdomain.com. Never get the code... Hmm, does it not like the word microsoft? So I try myname@mydomain.com, and I get the code! Although now I have to answer a bunch of questions and my account is under review -- I should get an answer within 24 hours. But what about the future? My real account is still microsoft@mydomain.com. Will this keep happening? :\

ArmandGrillet 9y ago

Microsoft truly sucks with account management. Here is what happened to me with Microsoft Office last week: - My Office University account expires. - My father invites me to be part of his Office 365 Family subscription (it includes 5 accounts). - I click on the "Get the invite" button on the email I have received and... "You already have an active account". There was no way from the website to cancel my expired University account, the only available option was to subscribe to my own Office 365 Personal account (€10/month). I have contacted Microsoft and it took 90 minutes of chat, including a one hour session where a Microsoft support guy took control of my computer (it was totally useless, the error has been solved by a modification in the Microsoft account database), to fix the issue. As titled here: this is insane.

sashk 9y ago
I had similiar problem. I called them, got to the real person, who fixed issue within 2 minutes. Total call time was about 5 minutes. That included time, I was searching for invite and so on.
- reitanqild 9y ago
  So basically you can be lucky - or not. IIRC my boss wasted a few hours on the phone with two MS employees - spread over a week or two because their accounting and customer service teams couldn't speak together it seems. I however was lucky, some tool I had bought was missing from my Windows Store account, after contacting them they contacted me back and I had it fixed within 20 minutes or something.

bsg75 9y ago

> Let me change my Skype username. What the hell, this is just obvious. The number of services that don't allow this is also insane. Its as if they use the username itself as a key, rather than one that is masked from the user allowing such changes.

josteink 9y ago

This thing singlehandedly made me ditch Skype. I didn't know which my login were and it was random which contacts I would see and which contacts were able to message me at all. I just gave up on it and never looked back.

bpicolo 9y ago

Google drive also has extremely frustrating multi-login issues. It frequently forces me to log out of all accounts in order to correctly access drive on a specific one. It's entirely random whether it works or not. It's just infuriating.

skinnymuch 9y ago
This drives me crazy. My business partner insists on using Google Drive. So I go along with it. But not being allowed to access my Drive while being logged into other Google accounts is so annoying.
- retromario 9y ago
  I'm not saying it's a solution, but as a workaround for similar situations it can help to use two browsers, one for each account.
  - jordanthoms 9y ago
    Yeah, the best solution here is to use multiple chrome profiles with one for each account. Google's multiple sign-in is incredibly buggy and is a huge pain when integrating with their oauth APIs

inopinatus 9y ago

To some extent I think this is a user category error. Similarly, one of my platform's most frequent support requests is account recovery due to a change of employment. The number of people who use their work email for personal accounts, without thinking about the long-term consequences, is staggering. Protip, don't name anything expecting you can change it later. See also: S3 buckets.

kolemcrae 9y ago
Or, you know, let us unlink accounts or change the username, two pretty normal and reasonable things to request.
- inopinatus 9y ago
  There's nothing that makes either reasonable, other than "I demand it".

oregontechninja 9y ago

I stopped using Skype forever ago, the service just turned to crap. Facebook video calls are easier at this point.

mevile 9y ago

Microsoft should fix this, but I have learned to never link my personal accounts with work accounts after the Dropbox enterprise debacle that led to users losing their personal files! after having their Dropbox linked to enterprise Dropbox and then leaving the company. These situations where you mix personal and enterprise/job accounts become edge cases that can be catastrophic for users stuck in them after they leave companies.

ianmcgowan 9y ago

Google used to be pretty bad at this too, but they seem to have their act together these days. It's not an easy problem. But yeah, when I go to use a Microsoft service online it's always a crapshoot, and certain products require either a personal account or a work account. Syncing OneNote is a confusing mess because of this. And don't get me started on Lync/Skype for Business...

orionblastar 9y ago
It is not always easy to do a good quality control when they downsize their best people and hire people willing to work for less money but a lower quality. Back in the 1990s I worked as a tech and programmer. I issued bug reports to Microsoft and they would fix them in the next service pack or version. But in doing so they'd change the Windows API calls which broke my Visual Basic programs. I had the Dan Appleman book on API calles but had to surf the net for the changes made to them on Microsoft blogs for developers or Yahoo Clubs on programming, etc. Everytime they made a book, it was outdated as soon as it was published.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Still have a couple of the Microsoft Developer Network t-shirts they mailed to you for reporting bugs in Visual C++/MSDN. I can remember having an issue with a Windows API call in the 90's and having to go on usenet to find someone who knew where to download an example program that Microsoft inexplicably removed from subsequent MSDN CDs.

__jal 9y ago

Shit like this is why I don't use anything from them. There are probably 15 or so different accounts for me in their DBs, which I will never even attempt to use again. Life is too short to put up with managing other people's CRM for them. Apple is actually getting close to this bad, too, and in some ways, worse. I gave my mother my old iPhone over a year ago. It was wiped, and we set it up with the 'family' whatsit. For reasons I won't go in to, at some point, I ended up giving her my Apple ID password to fix a problem when I couldn't do it. Ever since then, something has periodically decided to sync a random assortment of things. It isn't consistent, temporally or in terms of what it syncs. (I'm very anti-cloud-service; I don't use online backup, sync or cloud docs or any other sync services from Apple. I think my other uses the backup, but nothing else, because the phone is her only Apple device.) A few months ago, her contacts ended up splattered all over mine. I deleted them, it happened again a few days later, this time just a random assortment of them. Yesterday, my call logs ended up on her phone. Short of asking her to wipe the phone again, I don't know how to make this crap stop, but I'm sick of it. Seriously considering going back to a feature phone; everyone making modern phones appear to (a) make it impossible to have a self-contained phone without your personal life smeared across multiple companies' servers, and (b) be too incompetent to actually smear my personal life across their servers without fucking it up.

Frondo 9y ago
"For reasons I won't go in to, at some point, I ended up giving her my Apple ID password to fix a problem when I couldn't do it." I won't ask about the reasons, but it seems like everything in your email is a consequence of you setting up someone else's phone to use your account information. Sure, going to a feature phone would solve that, but so would not actually sharing your account with someone else. What else did you expect? In other words, how could Apple differentiate between "it's my account but not my phone" and "it's my account and it is my phone"?
- __jal 9y ago
  > In other words, how could Apple differentiate between "it's my account but not my phone" and "it's my account and it is my phone"? Because the phone in question used that Apple id precisely once, and is now configured with hers? There's obviously some foreign key floating around keeping the association, even though it should not be there. And that's ignoring the question of why and how, when syncing, backup, etc is turned off, my phone logs are even being sent to Apple at all, let alone leaked through to another phone? Same question with contacts - if I am not syncing or backing up, why does Apple grab my contacts? > What else did you expect? I expect, when logging in to a device with a given account, to only have access to things associated with that account. I also expect, when configuring something to not share data, that it not share data. Do you really have different expectations?

swamplander 9y ago

Similar hate post coming from me soon. I have an MSA & Office 365 (Azure AD) login using the same email. I use my MSA to login to my Surface, but now, all the sudden, I can't setup Outlook to connect to my O365 email. Their solution: rename your MSA. My response "no freaking way... no telling how much stuff that's going to break as I've used that MSA for over a decade". And then I read your post today... I'm glad I closed my Surface and went back to my MacBook last night... Ref: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Outlook/Can-t-connect-Outlook-2016-to-my-O365-Mailbox/m-p/63421#M555 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Outlook/Can-t-connect...

caconym_ 9y ago

I have two or maybe one Microsoft account(s). It's impossible to tell because I seem to have made two accounts that some parts of their systems think are the same, and other parts think are different. My theory is that I was a victim of some sort of migration bug at some point because I have had at least one account for a very long time (probably since Halo 2 for that online multiplayer). This problem makes it impossible to update relevant details on either account, IIRC. Their support is the worst; they were totally unable to even comprehend the problem I was seeing, let alone fix it. I just gave up trying to use them.

jakebasile 9y ago

Allowing username changes should be basic functionality in any system that has usernames. People change, names change, and so on.

jackvalentine 9y ago
And if you want to avoid abuse rate limit it to one change every 3 months, or $10 per change or SOMETHING.

franciscop 9y ago

I have been using Hotmail and Skype since the old days, but now my Skype (on Linux, mind you) is totally unusable and the Outlook online abomination is becoming WORSE every day. I just noticed today that they added a DOOOONG sound to the "webapp", but then when I open it nothing happened. It was a message in the "Others" recently added tab (not a folder, not spam, somewhere in the middle but physically in a totally different place). I love the "Done" action from Inbox (Google) as it's a perfect categorization. So I'm migrating everything to Inbox (Gmail) and people don't care at all switching to Hangouts instead of Skype.

twakefield 9y ago

My skype account was hacked (who's wasn't?) a few months ago. I tried to access it to change the password but in the process I was forced to link it some other Microsoft account that I didn't even know I had. It took me half the day to recover my original passwords then reset them. Now to get to Skype (if I'm logged out) I have to log into some Microsoft cloud identity thing. All for a service (skype) I rarely use.

ska 9y ago

The whole MS account management is a hot mess. I'm currently dealing with an issue with different versions of the same (MS) software getting authenticated via a domain but ending up pointing at two different MS accounts associated with the same email address, and hence consuming two licenses. 2 weeks of "support" back and forth hasn't helped, they seem to have good tooling to introspect what is happening.

BadassFractal 9y ago

I try to avoid using Skype if I can, it feels unloved, like it's barely hanging together.

trevyn 9y ago

Or just stop using Microsoft products? It's been pretty clear to me since about 1985 that other companies make equivalent products that tend to be more powerful and more pleasant to use. Your time and mental state are valuable!

orionblastar 9y ago
That is why people stuck to Wordperfect and Lotus Smartsuite bundles instead of Microsoft Office. Until new versions of Windows broke the third party office apps. GRR Martin still uses Wordstar in a DOS machine because he doesn't trust Windows to not crash or reboot on him and lose his data. Problem is the Microsoft tax on Intel or AMD PCs that OEMs have to pay even if they don't install Windows or Office. But now Office 2016 is installed but user needs to buy a key to use it for activation. I suggest that people use Libreoffice because it can read docx files etc.

justin66 9y ago

Merging a work account to a personal account just seems like a stupid thing to do to begin with. No good could have come of this.

kolemcrae 9y ago
I don't remember merging them. It must have happened years and years ago. I haven't worked for that company in a VERY long time.

stagbeetle 9y ago

Wooh, am I glad I'm not the only one experiencing account problems. An event I'm going to requires a Skype account of a preliminary interview. So I go to sign up with my gmail, and I'm able to create an account. However, I already had a Skype account through MS's weird Outlook program (I signed up with my gmail for Outlook, and it automatically created a Skype account without telling me . . . for the gmail account). This bricks both accounts by loading to an error page when I login, telling me to go to MS's website to fix my account. I go there and then after spelunking through the maze of a UI, finally get to a page that tells me I need to call Microsoft to diagnosis the problem. Screw that noise. It's 2017, this is archaic. Luckily, there's a third option for signing up and that's through a phone number. I do that, but now I don't know what to enter for the username field in my interview app. I look through Skype's help docs, and it doesn't say anything about phone numbers. I assumed my phone number is my username and that's how people can add me. Anyway, that's what I put in the app and I'm hoping that the UN acts like a UN and not a phone number with calling charges. What a mess. It's also partly the event's fault for using Skype when better alternatives exist.

Zekio 9y ago

TL;DR: impossible to delete old skype accounts without knowing EVERYTHING about it. I have like 3 old skype accounts which shows up with my name which I can't access due to me not having the email addresses anymore nor do I remember the passwords, so it is a pain when people try to add me on skype and I contacted them and asked if they could delete my old accounts since I can't access them and they said that is not possible since I don't remember all the security questions and answers, wouldn't even give me the questions so I could have a chance at answering them.. Edit: added TL;DR

ikeboy 9y ago

Any good way to search all my Skype chats? Or download complete history to a file?

Kenji 9y ago

Trust me, the Xbox accounts aren't much better. It is painful. I generally avoid Microsoft accounts like the plague.

jondiggsit 9y ago

I switched my (small) business back to running on Microsoft products like Office 365 and the account issues with my employees are driving me INSANE.

tostitos1979 9y ago

Had to deal with Windows/Skype/Office login issues for a senior. It is insane that people who pirate have an easier time than paying customers.

i336_ 9y ago
Not necessarily looking to go in the direction you mention, but I'm curious what you mean nonetheless - AFAIK, Skype's consumer/personal offering is free, and then you need to subscribe for business accounts because that all runs on microsoft servers. Are you referring to a different product, or are there copies of old enterprise skype server systems floating around out there?
- tostitos1979 9y ago
  This person had Skype credits and some calling plan. Very consumer level :)
  - i336_ 9y ago
    Sorry - I think there's been a misunderstanding. I was referring to the context you mentioned in the latter half of your comment, and the supporting circumstances for that. (In other words, I'm not aware of any way Skype can be pirated, and I'm not particularly aware of any, err, accessible commercial alternatives.)

tatersolid 9y ago

My corp can't use Azure. We really want to, we're mostly a MSFT shop that runs a largish SaaS application. But Microsoft automatically linked the organizational Azure account for our corporate internet domain to the personal account of an ops guy because of some cookie being present when he created the organizational Azure account. After six months of support calls MSFT cannot get it unscrewed. We're spending 50k USD per month with another cloud provider, and want to move to Azure to take advantage of SQL Azure and MSDN credits. But their screwed up account management system is losing them this revenue.

dvtv75 9y ago

I recently upgraded my Linux PC, and had to reinstall Skype. So I sign in to the new Skype, and can't remember my password. That's OK, I'll just get them to reset it. Oh, my email address expired while my PC was sitting on the junk heap? That's OK, I'll follow their prompts, this shouldn't be too difficult. "Unfortunately, we were unable to verify your ownership of this account using the information you provided. [...] Please submit a new account verification form At this point, your best option is to submit a new form with as much accurate information as you can gather." I've provided the details of six different users who were on my contact list, the complete email address I used to use, and there is nothing else I can do. No email address I can contact, no phone number to ring. Oh, and most importantly, there's no "Import old account settings" option. Screw you, Microsoft.

jackvalentine 9y ago

I got caught by another Skype issue - merged my long-time Skype account with my MS account. Old skype account - kinda bad password. MS account - great password, 2FA. Then I got alerts that someone in China had logged in to my MS account. I couldn't figure out how they'd done this until... I figured out they'd signed in to skype, using my old skype username and old skype password that were still valid for some unknown reason after merging it in to my far more secure MS account.

ap46 9y ago
It wasn't manually hacked, there's someone out there running a program to brute force known Skype usernames & spreading spam & confirming more Skype usernames. Alphanumeric password upto 9digits are not safe absolutely.
- jackvalentine 9y ago
  Well of course

red023 9y ago

People: You need to quit your usage of M$ products and services, this is insane.

lavalampkid 9y ago

I hope someone out there @ Skype or Microsoft sees this and puts it in front of the right people...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

richev 9y ago

The real fun starts if you need to change the email address associated with your Microsoft account. Six months and multiple support calls later and I'm still receiving Azure billing information and Xbox newsletters at the old address.

gambiting 9y ago

Ever since Lync(corporate IM system) got merged into Skype so that now it's just "skype for business" it's atrocious, easily the worst application I have on my PC. If someone goes offline, Skype will show you how long they have been offline for. Except....that it's just a random number. I can set my status to offline right now, and my coworker will see that I've been offline for.....168 days. Or 700 days. Or 35 minutes. Microsoft knew about this bug for years, and there is no fix for it. Frequently, when I send messages to my coworkers, they appear ABOVE older messages in the coversation, which is extremely confusing, because obviously the whole window will flash to indicate you got a new message, but in reality you have to scroll up to actually see it. Highlighting text is just broken, I dare anyone from MS to reliably highlight just a portion of text without the selection jumping to seemingly random part of the window without any indication how or why. Arbitrarily low character limit, so you can't paste snippets of code. During conference calls, audio just dies from time to time, and the only thing you can do about it is kill the conversation and start again. This is a product based off Skype, for fucks sake, that MS is charging us millions of dollars for globally, and that doesn't even have the basic functionality working correctly.

douche 9y ago
The Skype for Business client is still essentially the same as when it was Lync 2013. In the early days of the rebranding, the version number had only jumped a couple dozen revision numbers, keeping the same major and minor versions, and still calling itself Lync 2013 on the about dialog. Changes on the server-side have been even less drastic. Consumer Skype is still an entirely separate code base. The two IM platforms don't even speak the same protocol, and just barely interoperate. The naming change is illogical as all hell, but Microsoft bought Skype, and suddenly Lync needed to be rebranded under the Skype umbrella. Before it was Lync, it was Office Communicator, before that Live Communicator, and before that, I believe went under an MSN name. It's always been hitched to the latest marketing bandwagon. Lync/S4B is, sadly, one of the better enterprise IM systems, in comparison to other big players in that space, like Sametime, Jabber or Hipchat. It's still hot garbage.

Sami_Lehtinen 9y ago

Outlook doesn't validate email addresses correctly. Their validation is a complete failure. Even # isn't allowed in addresses. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.4 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.4

shinamee 9y ago

I should have raised this issue long time ago but why should I do so, after all its not like they're paying me to fix their shits. I basically moved from Skype to Zoom.us with all my clients

yazbo_mcclure 9y ago

Surface tech support messed me up with this as well. Somehow my personal email which I only never use and made to get minecraft for 10 that I will never play was getting all the emails about my bad dock. I feel bad when I deal with Microsoft it's a bad feeling I wish I didn't have to stay with Microsoft I would leave but where would I go? I'm to old to start over and the kids what about the children?

turc1656 9y ago

I am also having a Microsoft account issue that is similar to this. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oaccount-ocloseacc/problem-between-work-and-personal-accounts/38eae1e5-5ba9-4eb8-9c88-de9ac88b841a?tm=1489679818866&auth=1 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oaccou... Difference for me is that I have no idea how the work account was created. I do an have Office365 account from my employer but we just recently switched and I had this problem before that account was created. Also, that Office365 account is linked to my actual work email. The problem I am experiencing is a "work" account that was mysteriously created on my personal email and it makes no sense. Over a month and no one has responded. Anyone here have any ideas?

VSerge 9y ago

Skype also has a knack for randomly asking you to input a security code that it'll text or call you with, except... When I have recently needed to do it, I got 0 call or text. The email Skype offers to send a code to, in my case, isn't the email associated with the account but some old email that no longer exists (old recovery email I think). So I'm effectively locked out of my account on any new device for the time being, and getting zero feedback when reaching out to customer support. It is a maddeningly bad user experience, and I cannot believe a company like microsoft would let such crippling bugs exist on such widely distributed products.

ap46 9y ago

Someone has been successfully running brute forced attempts at login into accounts & spreading/amassing valid usernames & attempting brute force logins on them like a pyramid. My password of alphanumeric password of 9 digits got cracked & Skype fucking sent spam to everyone & now is most likely attempting to brute force their accounts as well.....they can't even implement a rate limiter for the logins against an IP.