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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

The reason is that I use NordVPN to connect to the internet.

I can tell you that using a VPN wasn't why your account was blocked. Most corporate employees connect to Outlook.com through corporate VPNs (both of my last employers required it).

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Could it be Nord VPN specifically which seems like a more popular consumer oriented VPN compared to say Corporate VPN ?

Yes. The VPN you use is basically attacking, bruteforcing Microsoft and multiple Microsoft services 24x7 continuously. Almost any consumer VPN will trigger something similar at every major service.

Do you mean the a mount of traffic that the VPN sends to MS would look like an attack?

I think it is just more likely MS doesn't know who you are yet. For example, if you're talking about how you get more captcha to fill out, I think this is because your IP address doesn't have the history to build reputation as you with MS.

I think the idea is bad actors are using Nord to attempt hAx0r1ng.

The VPN service isn't attacking Microsoft. Do you mean customers of the VPN are attacking Microsoft?

I use mullvad and have used other vpns all the time with zero difficulty. The only service I can't use is netflix and even they let me access my account just fine I just can't actually play videos while connected to the vpn.

There is a huge difference between not allowing access to the service via vpn and banning an account by virtue of accessing the account from a legitimate vpn service. The latter is unusual it is not something anyone ought to expect from "every major service".

> The latter is unusual it is not something anyone ought to expect from "every major service".

The latter is something I'd expect all the time, if I logged in to eBay from a M247 IP I'd expect the account to be suspended within minutes.

I can log into ebay with my vpn so long as I also also verify I have access to my email or phone. This does automatically trigger extra checking but they didn't suspend my account within minutes or indeed at all.

A corporate VPN probably wouldn't appear in the lists of "known VPNs" or have low IP reputation; also, outside perhaps of some subtle timing issues, there's nothing to distinguish client->corpvpn->service traffic from regular old probably-NATted traffic from that network.

It could be. We've had Microsoft accounts locked when they log in from other countries for suspicious activity. Had to unlock the account from the admin panel and it didn't have any issues with overseas access after that.

That would make sense in a corp environment but I only connect to the UK ones.

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