Same email linked to both Work and Personal account causing issues

Question

I have an email address (work email) that I discovered is linked to both a Work account and a Personal account in Microsoft. It is causing sign in issues and confirmation issues within Authenticator App and access to an associated Organization for OneDrive access.

Our IT says it's a personal account issue because my Work account is actually associated with a different email so they can not help me.

I can sign into both accounts separately on a computer, view my accounts, connections etc. and the "Personal" side seems to function alright with everything associated but if I try to access the shared OneDrive link with the other Organization linked to the Work account I get a Sign in error "Error finding and account to complete multi-factor authentication. You may need to add the account again" when I try to authenticate via the app. If I try to leave the organization I get the same error as well.

This outside Organization and their technical support tried to help me but it just keeps bringing me back to the error above if we use that email address. We tried to set up a new connection via the other Work account but because that account is not actually associated with an email inbox I can't retrieve the link that is only accessible via email associated with linked account.

Within the Authenticator App it bounces between showing one account as Work and one as Personal, and showing both as Personal after I authenticate computer logins.

I spoke to support on the personal side of Microsoft yesterday but got nowhere because everything with the personal appears functional. They gave me the direct Business number to contact but every time I try to dial out I get barred or incompatible messages on my work phone.

Submitting a support request via my account lead me to dead end too. I just want to speak to a human and hopefully get this resolved.

Answer 1

Hello @Kim LCF

Thank you for reaching out. Reading through the explanation you shared I assume you have same email registered as Personal as well as Work School account.

To fix this you can try to separate your work email address from your personal email address, by renaming your personal email address. Renaming your personal Microsoft account means changing the username and does not impact your work email or how you sign into business services such as Office 365. It also doesn't impact your personal stuff—it just changes the way you sign into it. However, to be on safer side please back up your data before making this change and read details about this on following article: Cleaning up the #AzureAD and Microsoft account overlap.

I hope this answer helps to resolve your issue.

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