Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's sign in is a real mess, I think in part due to having to make your hotmail login that you made 15 years ago still work, along with the dozens of other services that MS has acquired or integrated.

I've had a real shitter of a time trying to login before, with redirect loops, or getting automatically signed out as soon as I sign in. Or accounts being a "games for Windows" account, but not an MS account, or an Xbox live account, so some other account. Often I've just found it easier to give up and make a new account.

View on HN

I hear you.

I was pulling my hair out the other day trying to find my Microsoft credentials in LastPass. I was searching for "microsoft", "office", "outlook" etc. until I finally found them under "live.com".

I also have an @live.com email. I think "live" was one of Microsoft's many failed services rebrands. Remember windows live messenger, windows live photo gallery? Lol

And before that, the grandiose ".Net passport"

Microsoft's account system has had at least five different names; it's just "Microsoft account" right now, but it'll likely be called something different in a year or two the next time Microsoft does one of their gigantic "rebrand all the things" purges.

Speaking of Microsoft's signin, I can no longer access my decade-old-held Skype since their SSO integration. I've tried over and over and over and tried every route possible. It is some edge case where the email was previously a microsoft account and the password cannot be reset. I'm not the only one with the issue. Shocking something like this doesnt get resolved for years on.

I have a similar Skype issue. I have ancient Skype accounts with usernames, and my email address linked, but now use a Microsoft account for Skype with that same email address. Nobody can find and add my current account - whenever they search for my email address, all of my old usernames appear. I always have to add other users instead.

Very frustrating - fortunately I don't use Skype regularly but it's always an exercise when somebody asks for my username.

Authentication in Skype is awful. At one point, for reasons beyond me, I ended up having two accounts:

* One account required me to log in with a username, and was associated with my main email address. * The other account required me to log in with my main email address.

In a way, they were both related to the same email, but different accounts. This shouldn't even have been possible, but it seems that one was an old MS account, and the other was an old Skype account. My roster ended up being split half and half between the two.

I managed to merge my Skype and Xbox Live accounts, and couldn't get them separated again.

The steps I found to unlink within the XBox UI didn't work, futher research now leads me to the following discussion which I am about to try: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail...

Edit: it looks like this was possible in the past (basically deleting the Skype account?), but not anymore.

I had this problem, too. I fixed it by deleting my non-Skype account & waiting about 60 days.[1] Changing the email of the non-Skype account might have worked, too, but I didn't need two accounts & didn't mind waiting.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12412/microsoft-acc...

A ridiculous number of times that I've tried to go to xbox.com while previously signed in, the site redirects me around a bit before dropping me onto a blank page. Ugh.

I wanted to sign up for Office 365 a while ago. First thing that bothered me was the password limit of min 8 and max 16 characters (plus all the capital, special character, etc sacrifices you have to make). Second, after I signed up, you get a recommendation to switch off automatic password expiry! What the hell MS?

Microsoft login is still the very old Hotmail login dating back to 1996 or so. The Hotmail mail and account system got rebranded several times like MSN, Live, Outlook, Microsoft ID, etc.

Well, a login system is a very central part, and other websites suck too, like Amazon still uses the old account login page since 1996 too. But Microsoft redirects way too often, it is worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com