The Microsoft MFA system almost brought me to a nervous breakdown

Well, it is true, but there are a lot of other apps which don’t transfer to new phones. Google’s Authenticator app is such an example.

From what I understand: anything using the Secure Enclave as primary storage cannot be transferred.

I sign up for an account. It wants a phone number. I enter the phone number. It sends a text to validate it. Except it never sends the text. I go into my profile and enter it there. It still wants me to enter it for validation, and wants to send a text. Which it again never sends. You can try the next day, you can try two weeks later - they just don't send a text. My carrier is sprint/tmobile, spam/phishing protection is disabled. And no, like most other places, they won't robocall you and voice-read you the code.

A month later, your account is blocked because you didn't validate it.

Now, this is for their free accounts. If you pay them, this issue does not exist. In online forums, their support staff make ridiculous claims: our mfa server is down (for 2 weeks?), reinstall your browser, here's some instructions on how to click the "send sms" button.

So I use free microsoft accounts as temp accounts for orders that are going to spam me, and when they die in a month - all good.

Here's the thing though - for all of microsoft's user hostile practices, google's products are fifty times worse.

funny thing though - if you look at smaller shops specializing in one or two products, you don't have to use microsoft or google stuff, and there is a better alternative for everything those two make.

There's a chicken-and-egg problem here when people don't have access to both the old and new phone at the same time (or, as you say, they do a factory wipe), but to me that only suggests they need a different recovery process, not leak the customer's MFA secrets to the cloud.

MFA enable/disable: there are multiple places and methods to enforce MFA for users in a Microsoft tenant. So yeah, it can be disabled in one place, and enforced in another place. For example, conditional access policies may require it while the older deprecated interface for enforcing MFA may show it as disabled. For better or worse, this is common to many topics in Microsoft-land, a combination of there being three different ways to accomplish the same thing (which is probably most often a feature, honestly), and the relatively rapid pace of change (a double-edged sword) that deprecates terminology, branding, and tooling frequently. It does require you to actively work to stay informed about how the platform evolves over about a 18-24mo period.

Payment History/Billing: It honestly does benefit most business customers to work through a Microsoft partner rather than a direct relationship, oddly enough. A partner will often have far more flexible license commitment terms, more flexible payment methods, occasionally have better pricing, and always have better invoicing and reporting capabilities than are offered in direct relationships. Microsoft's cryptic payment history and invoice reporting is pretty offensive - it works great as long as you never have any questions.

All that said, direct relationships are for customers that just need the basic services without any special requirements; partner relationships are for businesses that have more mature requirements but don't want to be experts on the rabbit hole that is Microsoft-land. Many SMB Microsoft customers attempt to go it alone thinking it's easy (in no small part due to MS marketing) but the minute a business wants to get more than ankle-deep in any technical domain such as endpoint management, data loss prevention, compliance management, threat management, etc., they will quickly find themselves underwater - not because it's complex (it's all easy) but because it requires a lot of deep-quirk knowledge and ongoing maintenance and monitoring. This isn't necessarily particular to Microsoft, though I think a lot of marketing has gone into creating the impression that IT can be 'easy'. But just like a IDS/IPS, buying the tool is the easiest step - it's the care and feeding that really saps your labor force and makes most solutions fail. Policies need to stay relevant, state need to be monitored, deviation needs to be remediated, changes need to be incorporated. It (IT) takes constant work to do it right.

I always keep both.

In some countries, digital identity accounts are now required to buy food, https://txti.es/covid-pass/images.

Will government IT systems have fewer glitches than FAANG digital identity systems?

My team once had a bug on a client app that caused the phone to vibrate randomly, and the PM still wanted us to spend a week to rewrite an Android demo to iOS so he could look better for a presentation to the CEO next week instead of fix it.

Sometimes the release team will put their foot down on a really bad error rate and force a team to fix it or not get into the next release. You pretty much need hundreds of crashes an hour for that, though.

One guy paranoid about people trying to login with his phone number and flipping a weird option would just get set to priority normal, backlog status in the issue tracker and never looked at.

In my experience, we do have the same kinds of tools for surfacing those issues. Granted, they do tend to differ per function or even per org, although there are some standardized ones you can plug into to get e.g. issue aggregation, stack traces + metadata, etc. Granted... a lot of the time that requires a team to 1. actually plug into this infrastructure (otherwise it can either bubble up as an unknown exception or, worst case, get swallowed by a try/catch) and 2. actually pay attention to things once they do plug in.

The other problem is not just the high scale of traffic (or 5XXs or errors in general) but that high traffic is usually due to a myriad of products, features, etc. And there's just simply too much work for too few people. So, we prioritize based on severity of the inherent issue (e.g. privacy/security issues go to the top) or, if that's equivalent, number of affected users take priority. Which just means low-severity, low-impact bugs almost never get fixed. Especially if they have a workaround that can be surfaced e.g. when someone reports the issue to support.

Happy to elaborate further if that doesn't make sense. I also want to clarify that this explanation isn't meant to be some perfectly valid reason as to why this kind of work doesn't get prioritized. I agree a lot of times big companies fall short here, including where I work. This is just one of the many tradeoff that get made when there is more work than people.

It’s been awful for users since the second it went live. I’ve personally had to spend dozens of hours on it so far and I’m sure some fresh hell will show up tomorrow.

But everyone is excited because it’s one more dot on the PowerPoint of stuff team X has achieved this quarter.

And tracking down errors? Logs? Ppfftttt…guess what got descoped as low priority when everyone had to scramble. So chasing down even seemingly simple bugs is a nightmare.

One thing that the author never mentioned is whether or not he used the "Enable Flagging" option that is in one of the screenshots - that would actually be one of the best options, especially if he could then provide the specific correlation IDs in support requests.

My team had pretty high thresholds for errors. We’d review dashboards weekly to see any trends or changes.

Since then, they added a field on all feedback forms to fast track issues that result in data loss. However, they clearly didn't apply the same logic to login issues, perhaps fearing social engineering.

There are thousands of forum posts about this, with many referencing support tickets, etc...

The response from Microsoft is radio silence.

I mean, why would they care?

At the rate companies are buying into their eco-system, willingly making them dependant for ages...

What would happen if they fix all their crap, getting their act together?

Most probably: nothing - since all their broken-ness can't seem to slow down adoption, why would fixing it increase it?

They have been in this steady march to pull people in using tricks/dark patterns, then the services they for people into are almost always half-assed and break for no obvious reason, with catastrophic results.

People don't accept these broken ass systems unless they have to. Look at how iPhones, Macs and Chromebooks made inroads. MS is going to lose out on the next generation of computing, but instead of improving, they are doubling down on the BS.

Microsoft is the same shitty, incompetent, abusive, predatory company that I remember from the nineties and will likely never change.

The confusion of having a Mojang account and Microsoft account is not the dumbest thing I’be encountered but it is one of the dumbest in my history.

The biggest stupidity was that I gave his real age, which made it impossible for him to connect to multiplayer servers until I selected an option but it was impossible to find.

The so-called security is way over-the-top and doesn’t increase security, it just makes it impossible to use. It’s the worst form of “security” I’ve ever seen in a supposedly high tech company

Quietly, Microsoft have turned a world where EditPad was a hot new thing, to a world where a few people could open the same OneNote notebook if it was on a local fileshare, to a world where Office365 is all of your company sitting inside a collaborative cloud-based Microsoft Office environment where everything is connected to everything and you can embed any kind of Office program into Teams channels, access all of them over the web, notify coworkers through the Graph, sync files through OneDrive, search accross all your employer's data with AD based permissions, and do similar with other companies using Microsoft tools, and it's all pluggable with things from Adobe and Trello and whomever, and you hardly have to set anything up for it, no web servers, no database schemas, no daemons, etc.

And it's completely passed the Linux world by. Head-in-the-sand "nothing has changed in computing in decades I can edit text files any way I like" obliviousness that there's any other world out there.

Teams is horrible software, sluggish, buggy, RAM hungry, and yet it could be the greatest strategic success of Microsoft for the 2020-2030 decade. Much more impactful than Windows 11 or Windows Server 2022. It's more immediate than Outlook email, simpler than any VoIP phone system, easier to search than any network fileshare, simpler to setup than Exchange, and yeah you're doing the "no wifi less space than a Nomad, lame" response because "chat programs existed before", and you're wrong to do that, it's more easily remotely usable than any VPN client, pluggable, connectable, bot-scriptable - and right there in every company that uses Office365 unlike (Slack, Discord, Zoom, et al). It's what they tried for with Skype and Lync and LiveMesh and SharePoint 2007 all merged together and they've done it this time and that should make you pay attention. Any ordinary employee who can use Microsoft stuff can use it, it doesn't need an Org Mode tutorial or a `git init` or an email from IT telling you which server address to put in which settings dialog, or a signoff to buy from yet another SaaS vendor.

Outlook will let you make a new Teams meeting from the same place you make a new email. When you write the recipient's emails in the To field, LinkedIn profiles appear for the names you hover over. There were no Zoom plugins, no LinkedIn plugins to install. I don't like it, business people love it. Office quietly gained the ability to search text in pictures, and handwriting. And it is cheap with a lower case c, Office, all of it, desktop and web, and cloud file store, and integrated services, for the price you might pay for a Zoom or a Dropbox or a 3rd party single-purpose cloud service license.

It's not exciting, it's not going to convince anyone who hates Microsoft to switch, it's not great quality software, but Microsoft have not been resting on their laurels; they have been cementing their place in the heart of business IT, putting down roots, and building things people want. It used to be the case that if you wanted Microsoft Excel, other things were polished but nothing else was quite the same. Now it's more likely the case that if you buy from a competitor you get a pile of janky sluggish cloud awfulness just the same, but from another vendor and it's more expensive and less interoperable. Now to make a good all-purpose Excel competitor it needs Windows and Mac and iOS and Web versions and cloud file storage service and good integration and start from $0 for personal use.

"Microsoft doesn't know what they're doing" is not the right response.

At some point during their growth, companies just flat out cut all ties between customers and people who actually work there. The only way for a customer to reach the people writing the code (and able to fix the error 500) is through external channels. Same for billing issues and similar problems too, there's people working in the billing department but customer service is utterly incapable of actually reaching them.

Back when I did IT, occasionally changing someone's name would work for everything but Office 365. Only, Office 365 would appear to have the correct name everywhere that we could see, and that MS support could see, but sign into Office on a fresh Windows install to activate it and the wrong name pops up every single time. Some system failed to update somewhere inside the underbelly of MS, which their support cannot acknowledge as a possibility - it must be one of our systems (though they never say what exactly, since then we could disprove their claims).

The only workaround we found was to change the affected users' accounts to something else, wait a couple days, then change it to the correct name, and it usually worked. Keyword: usually. Sometimes you had to repeat the process before whatever mystery system MS runs got fixed. All the while, their support would staunchly deny that this could ever be a problem with their systems. Not a "we'll look into it" form response, even, just a very toned-down version of "you're lying, it's all your fault, fuck off."

The best part is that they know that there's no way we could just stop using Office (or Windows, for that matter), so there's no incentive for them to fix these things. Instead, they can just have support give us the run around claiming their products are perfect.