Licensing issue blocks Microsoft 365 Family for some users

Microsoft is investigating a potential licensing issue blocking access to Microsoft 365 services for some customers with Family subscriptions.

After a massive wave of user reports on social media and the company’s community website, Microsoft confirmed that some customers could no longer access Microsoft 365 using subscriptions that have yet to expire.

As customers affected by the licensing issues reported, those impacted are being warned that their subscription has expired and prompted to renew it even though it was already renewed in recent months and is still active.

“I checked my family manager’s account and the subscription is active and shared, but I got booted from my Word app and there’s no subscription showing in my account page,” one said.

“I am still able to access my OneDrive files and to work on desktop installed apps of word and excel, the problem is mainly with outlook which has limited functionality now and tells me that I need to subscribe to Microsoft 365,” another added.

The company acknowledged these ongoing problems on its official Service Status portal, adding that it’s currently reviewing telemetry data and recent changes within the service to isolate the root cause of the issues.

“We’re aware of an issue impacting Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions,” Redmond confirmed via its Microsoft 365 Status on Twitter.

“Users with Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions may be unable to access Microsoft 365 services. We’re reviewing service telemetry and recent changes within the service to isolate the source of the issue,” it added on the service health page.

On Wednesday, Microsoft addressed another outage, blocking admins worldwide from accessing the Exchange Admin Center (EAC).

Last month, it also mitigated two Exchange Online incidents, which prevented Outlook on the web users from accessing their mailboxes and caused delays and failures when sending or receiving email messages.

This is a developing story…