Two years ago, a $24 autopay charge on my Azure account failed. The invoice is now marked "Locked" in their billing portal.

I cannot pay this invoice. There is no button to pay it. There is no button to dismiss it. There is no way to interact with it at all.

Azure displays a banner: "You must pay all previous invoices before creating new subscriptions." Fair enough. I would love to pay it. Microsoft won't let me.

So I tried to contact support.

The Azure portal requires a "paid support plan" to create a support ticket. To purchase a paid support plan, you must create a subscription. To create a subscription, you must clear outstanding invoices. To clear outstanding invoices, you must contact support.

Azure on Twitter, as well as the website claims to have a "free support ticket" option for billing issues, but every possible link just drives you back to the same FAQ page while refusing to let you submit a ticket.

I called every number I could find:

1-800-867-1389 rings busy indefinitely. 1-855-270-0615 connects to an AI that asks what you need, tells you to visit the website, and disconnects. 1-800-642-7676 connects to a different AI that also tells you to visit the website. The website has a chatbot that redirects you to FAQ articles regardless of what you type. If you express frustration, it throws an error and stops responding.

I submitted feedback through the Azure portal every few days for weeks. No response.

I am a software engineer, so I did something ridiculous.

I wrote a PowerShell WinForms application that authenticates via device code flow, queries the Az.Support API for problem classifications, and calls New-AzSupportTicketsNoSubscription to submit a billing support ticket directly, bypassing the portal entirely.

Note the API name: NoSubscription. Microsoft has an explicit API for ticketing without a subscription.

It worked. The ticket was submitted. I felt briefly victorious.

The API responded: "Your support plan type is Free. To create and update support tickets, you need access to our high-tier support plans."

I had built custom software specifically to work around Microsoft's broken support infrastructure, and I still hit a paywall.

The total amount Microsoft is owed: $24.

The total amount Microsoft is preventing me from spending on new Azure services: thousands. I currently run numerous websites out of my house, and it's getting to be enough that I want to offload it to Azure VMs. Additionally, I was going to shift my development to Azure boxes, etc.

I have exhausted every official channel. Every phone number, every chatbot, every feedback form, every API endpoint. There is no path to a human being without first paying for a support plan that I cannot purchase because of the billing block that I need support to resolve.

Has anyone successfully escaped a loop like this? Is there a secret handshake I'm missing? Or is the only option to abandon this Microsoft account entirely, get a new phone, and start fresh?

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user:	voidsnax
created:	March 28, 2016
karma:	64