Not able to recover. "beat the robot" check freezing.

Question

Hopefully someone can help with this incredibly frustrating issue. Seems Microsoft don't give a stuff, so I'm left without any access.

I was hit by a car on Saturday, very distressing, broke several bones including my neck. So as I'm sure everyone can imagine, I'm in a very vulnerable situation. My phone obviously was destroyed. Now everyone's life is in their phones, but with iCloud backups and MFA etc, I wasn't too worried.

Got a new iPhone 16e on Sunday, restored it from iCloud, and proceeded to start recovery of access to various secure apps and services. But, many require Authenticator MFA, no problem I though, I backed it up. I started the recovery, and first step it asks you to "Authorise the access in MS Authenticator", but I don't have Authenticator (hence why I'm recovering it). So I select, "use different method" get the codes via email, then get the code via text.. All good.

But then the "Help us beat the Robots" check appears, where you move the cartoon hand to point in the same direction. This is buggy as hell, it just fails... Every... Single... Time... I've tried every day for 3 days now, and it ALWAYS fails. So I have to cancel the request to recover my authenticator backup, and try again. But it fails again.

And at that point I have consumed the 2 (yes, just 2) codes that are allowed to be sent to me. So I have to wait 24 hours to try again. But in 24 hours time the 'Robot check" will fail again and I will be at the same situation... AGAIN.

As you can probably tell, I'm getting incredibly vexed, Microsoft 365 support are of no help, as they do not support the Authenticator app. But if MS force people to use this app for MFA, then they should offer some support or at leats make it so the recovery process works. I've had to create a new hotmail/outlook.com account to post this as I cannot authenticate my usual account.

Is there anything I can do or can I speak to someone about this because this is starting to be a stress point that I do not need at the moment.