REDUNDANT ACCOUNTS PREVENTING ACCESS TO CURRENT ACCOUNT

Question

I CANNOT ACCESS MY CURRENT MICROSOFT ACCOUNT BECAUSE MICROSOFT'S FLAWED SYSTEM DEFAULTS TO OLD REDUNDANT ACCOUNTS. I THEREFORE CANNOT ACCESS THE ACCOUNT I'M PAYING FOR, WHICH IS AGAINST THE LAW IN AUSTRALIA. FURTHERMORE, I CANNOT GET ANY USEFUL SUPPORT FROM THE PROVIDER, WHICH IS ALSO AGAINST THE LAW.

Answer 1

Hi, Bill Jacobs

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

Sorry for this frustrating experience that you're encountering. This usually happens when your device or browser has an old Microsoft, work, or school sign-in cached, so it keeps reusing the last account it remembers instead of the one you actually pay for. If you’ve ever had two accounts sharing the same email, it gets even messier because the sign-in screen can’t reliably tell which identity you mean.

Here are some suggestions you can try:

Open an InPrivate/Incognito window and sign in directly at account.microsoft.com/services, then go to office.com from that same window. This avoids stale cookies that auto-pick the old account.

On Windows, go to Settings > Accounts > Email & accounts and also Access work or school, remove anything that’s the old or redundant account, then reboot. Those stored links can keep forcing the wrong sign-in every time.

In Control Panel > Credential Manager, delete saved entries that mention Office, Outlook, ADAL, OneDrive, Teams, or the old email. That clears old tokens so apps have to ask for the correct account again.

If you see “Which account do you want to use?” with the same email twice, change the personal account’s primary sign-in alias (add a new email alias, make it primary, remove the conflicting address). This separates the identities so Microsoft stops defaulting to the wrong one.

If you still can’t reach the paid subscription, contact Microsoft Account and give the order/charge details, ask them to either attach the subscription to the correct account or process a refund since you cannot access the service.

Hope this helps. Feel free to get back if you need further assistance.

---

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment."    

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.