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by halfbrite 1434 days ago
We are having a combined issue very similar to this, and other comments in this thread.

We have been using Azure for 5+ years, we are quite heavily invested. Our payment card expired and so we decided (as good customers) to update our card, only Microsoft's billing will not accept it because it will not go over to the embedded payment gateway page.

We provided screen share sessions to their "manager", we provided HAR files from Edge to support "engineering" diagnose the problem, and we provided proof that it is their own servers responding with 500 Internal Server Error messages and 403 Forbidden errors.

The Microsoft support agent admitted that there is a fault with their system. They admitted that they need to fix it.

We keep asking for the issue to be escalated - it never is. We keep asking for the issue to be treated as a complaint - it never is. The agent simply will not do the things we ask.

Communication is like getting blood out of a stone. Once a week if we push out two or three reminders, always out of hours even though they repeatedly ask us what ours suit us. They even schedule calls and don't call.

2 months later, they tell us that 35% of Microsoft customers with our bank have this issue and they're not going to do anything about it, so uh, I guess we're up the creek with this? Thanks Microsoft, you're letting down our 70,000ish customers and we're not going to take the blame for it - we'll be honest with them.

And so we became AWS customers. Zero problems with payment. Zero problems with our Linux services migrating across. The only issue for us is a technical debt issue - migrating old .NET web apps.

The whole affair has really soured my personal and our customers opinion of Microsoft.

2 comments

Unfortunately, one common approach with clouds these days is "unless you're big enough or in good relation with us and advertise us to others at every opportunity (or otherwise align with our vision where we want to be), we won't do shit for you, because it doesn't affect our bottom line".

In other words, after the initial years where clouds were startup-friendly, it became very enterprisey very fast.

Not my experience with AWS, but I didn't have the chance to talk to support at Azure/GCP to make a fair comparison.
Unfortunately, this is what I've heard happened to a medium-sized org at least. It's less about the support itself, but more so on the strategic/partnership side.

But I understand, such things are expected and change over time, so this is not set in stone and depends on the current climate at any org/cloud.

I know there is a reason why I keep two separate Microsoft accounts - one for the Office stuff and one for my Xbox - because I'm absolutely sure that Microsoft will eventually mess something up one way or another..

But to be fair: Five or so years ago I couldn't change any personal data in my Playstation account for over two years! Sony wasn't able to perform a simple CRUD operation on its database - and the error message went basically nowhere.