I was using my Azure Pay-As-You-Go subscription and my VM's were randomly stopped without any good reason why. I noticed on the subscriptions page that my subscription was disabled and I received this message on my subscription's page:
"We've identified suspicious activity in this subscription. To protect your account, we've disabled the subscription. Please contact Azure Support to resolve the issue."
So I did exactly that, I created a support ticket, stated that I wish for my subscription to be re-enabled and waited. Whilst creating the support ticket it gave me some recommendations as found in the "Solutions" tab when I make a support request. The main resource that was helpful honestly wasn't helpful at all. My credit isn't expired, my spending limit isn't reached (it's unlimited) as this is a Pay-As-You-Go subscription. My bill isn't due as I haven't been given my first invoice yet as I just recently started using Azure, my credit card spending limit isn't a factor as I haven't been charged quite yet. My subscription wasn't accidentally disabled either as I couldn't reactivate it as the "Reactivate" button was greyed out.
A few minutes later I received an email saying this:
Hello,
Thank you for reaching out. Unfortunately, we could not verify your account information. Our earlier decision remains and your account will stay closed. Please understand that we keep security checks like these in place in order to protect the quality and integrity of the Azure service.
Thank you,
Azure Support
This makes absolute no sense for so I emailed them back, realising I got no reply and that I won't get any reply because the support ticket was closed when I received the message. Just for fun I did lie about what I use Azure for but I'll get onto that later. Anyways, I sent a second support ticket to Azure and played with it a little bit to make it seem like I was hacked and I scared the hacker away and just wanted my account back. I got this message from them lol:
Hello,
Thank you for reaching out. Unfortunately, we could not verify your account information. Our earlier decision remains and your account will stay closed. Please understand that we keep security checks like these in place in order to protect the quality and integrity of the Azure service.
Thank you,
Azure Support
Well....this is helpful. So I sent a third support ticket for fun (I was pretty annoyed ngl). So I made the title: Carrying on from my previous case and just asked them what the hell that silly message means. I thought that this is just silly and there must be another way to contact them, then I found their Twitter profile and asked them if I provided my subscription details they'll be able to re-enable my subscription or at least figure out what caused my subscription to be disabled. Luckily, they didn't say that message I mentioned earlier. Instead, they said that it could only be assisted by the support team I was using. So I had almost lost hope at this point. They also mentioned to respond to the email support I received (which to clarify does nothing as the cases were automatically closed).
My understanding is that I was just being support by bots. The Twitter profile said that they were actually technicians, (that are people) but I disagreed. Speaking of lying as I said a couple paragraphs ago, I did think that mining cryptocurrency on the virtual machines could be the cause and I received an email earlier on that I "violated the Microsoft Acceptable Use Policy." I did scavenge this and found nothing about cryptomining. I did find forums on the internet with similar issues but this isn't the first time I'm stopped for doing something for "violating T&C, Privacy Policy, etc" when there is literally nothing in these to back up what I broke/how I broke them.
So I had little hope at this point, but had a fun idea. So I made a support request saying:
Prove You're Not A Bot By Replying With A Message That ""IS NOT"" (insert that annoying message from Azure support here)
.....I received the exact same message, the support case was closed and it just brought me to here. By the way, I did notice that there were several Azure Support options to purchase, but since my subscription was disabled, my whole account was "disabled" (I could only write support tickets and read just about everything, but I don't have access to resources like connecting to my virtual machine), meaning I couldn't upgrade my support options even if I wanted to (for just this issue I'm not going to pay for something small and annoying)
Conclusion:
This is honestly hilarious how terrible Azure support and Microsoft support is. I told Twitter than I ran this social experiment and proved their theory wrong that technicians respond to the emails. Not one word was changed for all 5 silly unnecessary support requests I made.
I apologise for all the information I bombard you with, but this is ridiculous in the fact of MS Azure's support quality and it's ridiculously hilarious that I basically proved that this is most likely run by bots.