MFA enabled with no validation methods

Question

I made a rookie error and now I am locked out of my tenant.

1 user license with MFA enabled. I was having issues adding my account to Outlook so I went in and removed validation methods from MFA and then tried turning off MFA. I then hit sign-out everywhere and I guess I did not turn off MFA properly. Now when I try to login to the tenant I get prompted for MFA with no validation methods available and I am unable to login to make any changes.  Does anyone know of a way to get access to my tenant?

Answer 1

I've contacted Microsoft support about the issue and it has been escalated.  I was juggling several issues while trying to figure out why I could not add my Office 365 account to Outlook after a fresh install.  MFA was one of the issues I read about that can cause the problem I was seeing when trying to add my account to outlook.  I had several Office 365 accounts setup in my tenant with two of them being Global Admins and only one (my primary account) being licensed.  In a star alignment causing unpresented dumbness I had forgotten about keeping an unlicensed global admin account available and proceeded to clean up all of the accounts in my tenant leaving only the one single licensed account.

1. I disabled MFA for my single account via Office 365 admin portal not like the link  you sent. Apparently not the correct way. I also removed both validation methods and selected sign-out of all devices. 

2. I use a local AD account in the tenant.

3. See initial statement. I only have a single account.

I am effectively locked out of my tenant and in my mind only a restore of my tenant can get me back on track. Unless Microsoft has a backdoor with a God account and can disable MFA or add a validation method things are not looking too good for me at the moment.

TF 

Answer 2

Hi Tango Foxtrot 69,

Welcome to Microsoft community. Thank you for posting in our forum.

I'm sorry to hear that. I can imagine that must be frustrating. To investigate the issue, I'd like to confirm the following things:

1. Do you turn off MFA for users in Office 365 admin portal with similar steps mentioned in this article?
2. What is the environment of your tenant? Do you use local AD and sync users to Office 365?
3. If there are other admins in your tenant, let them check if they can turn off MFA for that specific account.
4. Please provide a screenshot of the error message to help us better understand your situation.

Thanks,

Nerissa