Microsoft Account Problem

  

 

 

For the longest time now, my PC has been throwing the following Windows notification at me pretty much daily:

For those readers who may not know what the above message means, Microsoft strongly advises that every Windows user should create a Microsoft account that's linked with their device (which can be a personal computer, tablet, phone, etc.)  The notification is telling me that there is something wrong with my Microsoft account and asking me to log into that account, presumably to resolve the problem.  

As I say, I've been seeing this notification almost daily for quite some time now, but I've been ignoring it because I wasn't having any problems with my PC or with Windows except for the annoying recurrence of the notification itself.  However, I finally got tired of the persistent nagging and decided to do something about it.  And so, I clicked on the message at the bottom to sign in to my Microsoft account.

Now, before I go on, I should note that the message is peculiar in itself, as it implies that I'm not already signed in to my Microsoft account, but my Microsoft account is linked to my PC, which runs Windows.  Ergo, I should be signing into my Microsoft account each time that I start Windows on my PC, so why is this notification implying that I'm not already signed in?  Curious. 

Having clicked on the notification, the following prompt appeared:

Once again, I was being told that I needed to sign into my Microsoft account so, ignoring the fact that I thought I had just tried to do exactly that, I obligingly clicked the 'Sign in' button.  That resulted in the following prompt:

 

 

Okay, so Microsoft wants to be sure that it's me.  That's fair enough, I suppose.  The 'Windows Security' heading at the top tells me that I'm accessing the Microsoft account that's linked to Windows, which runs on my PC, so the PIN that it's expecting should be the same one that I use to sign into Windows.  

 

Note the string of digits on the 'Identity' line.  That's my phone number.  It is not the identity with which I sign into Windows on my PC.  I used to have a second Microsoft account that did use my phone number as the identity.  It was linked with my Skype ID.  I deleted that account when Microsoft ended support for Skype, replacing it with Microsoft Teams, which is just like Skype, except that it sucks.  This was the first clue that something was indeed amiss.  I was being asked to sign into a Microsoft account that should no longer exist.  At least that explains why I wasn't already signed in.  Since there was no option for changing the identity for a different Microsoft account, I entered my PIN number and clicked the 'OK' button.  

 

Now, friends, there were only two things that could have happened after I clicked 'OK'.  One was that I'd be signed into my old Microsoft/Skype account and given further instructions, which wasn't very likely.  Hell, I didn't expect it!  The other possibility was that I would be told that no such account existed and never to be seen trying to sign in with that identity again, which was what I expected.  But there was a third possibility which I hadn't anticipated:

 

I was told that my phone number doesn't exist as a username (didn't I just say that?)  This time, however, there was an option to sign in with a different username, so I selected that.  

 

 

That gave me a 'Sign in' dialog, where I entered my Microsoft Windows account ID (the one that I should already be signed into) and clicked 'Next' to sign into it.

 

 

That led to a demand to enter my password, but at least asking me to do so for an account that I was already signed into was justified by the fact that I was accessing "sensitive info", so I humored it and entered my password (which had recently been referred to as my PIN number just to keep things as confused as possible) again and clicked the 'Sign in' button, to be greeted by ...
 

OH, FOR THE LOVE OF ... I was now officially going 'round in circles!  Once again I was asked to enter my PIN in order to "make sure it's me."  Notice that my identity had suddenly reverted back to my phone number, even though moments before I had clearly, expressly and unequivocally requested to sign in with a different ID!

 

This experience makes it easy to understand why casual PC users get frustrated.  I make my living as an Information Technology (I.T.) professional, yet I was at my wits' end (though nowhere near the end of my dictionary of expletives) trying to solve what should have been a relatively simple problem.  To this day, I still get daily notifications from my PC that there's a problem with my Microsoft account and, to this day, I have no idea what that problem might be, because I can't sign in to fix it and everything seems to work anyway.  I just blow it a raspberry before dismissing the notification, but doing so at least gives me some small satisfaction.