Microsoft 365 Family licensing snafu causes a ‘Your subscription expired’ message

Microsoft has just found a new way to interfere with its customers’ productivity. While software updates are frequent culprits for downtime,  some Microsoft 365 subscribers have been hit with a warning that their subscription has expired, leaving them unable to edit Office documents.

The issue affects Microsoft 365 Family users, many of whom have been locked out of their accounts despite having a valid subscription in place. The problems started yesterday and are still ongoing for some.

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The licensing problems meant that large number of users -- many of whom took to social platforms to complain and try to find out what was going on -- were treated as though their active subscriptions had expired. Leaving people without the ability to edit their files caused understandable frustration and anger.

Microsoft says that it was able to use telemetry data to help identify what had gone wrong, ultimately coming up with the fairly meaningless explanation of a “recent change” being to blame. The company then opted to reverse the change that caused problems, saying that it believes the issue to be fixed.

For anyone still affected, Microsoft says:

Users should refresh their browser or restart the application to ensure the client-side caches are updated.

In an attempt to calm the anger caused by the incident, the company says: “To help prevent similar impact in the future, we're further reviewing our testing and validation processes prior to deployment”.

Image credit: Yuliya Rudzko / Dreamstime.com