Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning, rejects appeal
86 comments
·July 29, 2025rossdavidh
WarOnPrivacy
> I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that it's just an automated process that is misfiring.
I could agree with the beginning of that but not the classification of a misfire. A misfire implies a brief, exceptional occurrence and neither of those adjectives seem likely here.
That's based on a few years spent in Microsoft's forever-shuffling admin carousel (EAC, Exch Migration, Intune, Azure hydra, 365/Copilot-all-the-things). Thru that, I have come to believe that incompetence is almost always the right answer for MS-generated woes.
lawlessone
The support for issues like this from all big corps is always horrendous.
Google is similarly notorious for brining businesses to a halt and only fixing the issue when it makes the news and a human at Google finally sees it.
8note
> However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time
this risk goes for any 3rd party, at least the ones that follow sanctions compliance or suspicious activity monitoring. if your name shows up on a denied party list, it's illegal for anyone to tell you why they arent talking to you anymore.
bravesoul2
Yeah if Microsoft is banning 1% of accounts and independently 0.01% have a newsworthy conspiracy angle then on average One in a million users would fall in this bucket. p is going to be near 1 without other info.
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chasil
As I hear stories of Apple, Google, and Microsoft revoking valuable access, I remember this article...
"Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms."
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
israrkhan
In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
Facebook, instagram, uber, lyft, doordash, instacart, and hundreds of unicorn businesses are literally built on top of ecosystems that are controlled by 2 or 3 companies.
ajb
If you have billions of dollars of revenue, you can make the law of tort work the way it is supposed to.
graemep
If you have a possible very high return for taking that risk (as the unicorn businesses do) then do it in full knowledge of the risk.
I am not convinced those businesses are good examples. Could they have redeployed elsewhere if they had to? Where they tied to one supplier? Did they have backups else where?
Most businesses and individuals do not have to take that risk and can avoid it.
SpicyLemonZest
The key insight is that mitigating risk isn’t a free action. No business has the bandwidth to avoid even most of the risks they could in principle avoid; you allocate some effort towards the ones that make sense to mitigate, and hope the others don’t come to pass.
thewebguyd
I mean, technically you don't have to use those ecosystems and could roll your own stuff, including infrastructure instead of AWS but it's definitely going to be expensive.
Which is why we need regulation for those big players (gatekeepers as the EU has taken to calling them). If you're going to be so huge that you essentially operate your own market and economy, then you need to be regulated like one, and forced to play nice, interoperate, and not favor your own services.
unyttigfjelltol
Not so technically, your business needs customers and efficiencies. Big tech strategically positions themselves at those choke points.
But realistically , if Google and Apple both for whatever reason banned you from all their services, idk why, then you would not have access to a phone. So then you say, well, it was just one person in ten million, and they probably did something wrong-- and now you share the same perspective as Big Tech on this specific issue.
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worik
> In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
No it is not
It is often difficult and expensive, relative to letting Facebook (or the like) do the hosting.
But VPSs are a thing, you can run almost any software on them.
Stretching the analogy: Build your castle on your own bedrock, and build "forts", or "outposts", on the enemy territory
Ignoring Facebook et. el. is stupid, but depending on them is fool hardy
dgrin91
Thats not what other people's kingdoms means. Basically all non-trivial apps are already built on VPSs. The other people's kingdoms refers to how people interact with your app. Take Zynga - they were not literally running on FB servers, I'm sure they had their own VPS, but their games just had 0 reach outside of FB. When FB decided to change things Zynga just got fucked, VPS or not.
pphysch
There was a fleeting moment where the Internet was the "Wild West" but we are long past that. The GP's idiom is about as practical as "don't be a citizen of any state".
metalliqaz
That is a really great analogy and it's so true.
The only counter point I can think of is that you can always choose to build upon multiple tech platforms simultaneously, and depending on the technology you need, it might not even add all that much additional cost to do so.
msgodel
There's a good reason they're called unicorns. That's not a strategy you should adopt for any business that's actually important to you.
throwaway290
When did it happen in Apple land?
tracker1
Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups... Have at least one backup/copy of your own data on your own hardware. I have onedrive, google-drive and dropbox copied to my nas as well as my desktop and laptop. Other projects are in github or gitlab and copied on my nas.
That said, I should better automate my project backups... I also need to get my backup (redundant) NAS at a friends house (vpn) so that I can have an extra level of safety.
thewebguyd
> Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups.
Hell, even Microsoft (on the enterprise side of 365) says do not treat their services as a backup.
But we do need to get stricter about the messaging these companies are allowed to put out there regarding their services. Microsoft with one side of their mouth says 365 is definitively not a backup, and then turns around and advertises OneDrive on Windows as a backup with the "back up your folders now" notification.
To consumers that don't know any better, it's misleading and leads to a false sense of security, though I suspect "this service is not a backup and you can lose your account and all your files at anytime" doesn't sell as many subscriptions.
bravesoul2
Google is good in this regard as you can schedule a takeout and get a complete dump. Stick that on a drive that is running backblaze and do periodic physical backups.
davoneus
Absolutely! I do this yearly. It's a great way to ensure that a SNAFU somewhere doesn't nuke years of photos, email and documents.
cm2187
So what happens if he uses windows 11 and its mandatory online account, his computer is bricked?
RachelF
People don't realize how fragile this makes things.
Requiring an online ID to log into a local computer creates all sorts of vulnerabilities. When Microsoft gets hacked again, it can let hackers lock you out of your computer. It's basically ransomware-in-waiting.
eMPee584
>It's basically ransomware-in-waiting. RIWAAS, nice. Classic ms move.
Simulacra
When it first came out, I declared that Windows 11 is a hate crime. Nothing has caused me to change that an inch. It is 100% anti-consumer.
rs186
The moment I saw nytimes' reporting that a dad lost access to his Google account because of "nude" photos of his baby and couldn't get help, I de-Googled almost completely and am now using fastmail as my main email account. My other inboxes are only kept just in case someone reaches me via those old addresses.
I knew that if I didn't do that, the same thing would some day happen to me.
eYrKEC2
Fastmail is headquartered in Australia and Australia has censorship laws. Hope you're "aligned"!
rs186
I haven't been affected by any of those censorship laws and I doubt it ever will (in which case I'll just use a different provider). The biggest difference is that if something goes wrong, at least there is a real human being I can talk to at Fastmail.
guffins
Then you just switch to another provider. The important part is owning your domain name and not relying on someone else’s.
gnabgib
A LibreOffice dev gets locked out of his /hotmail account/ and neowin turns this into a Microsoft developer ban? Specious reporting.
Mike doesn't make this claim in the original source: https://mikekaganski.wordpress.com/2025/07/25/microsoft-anyb...
Hotmail/outlook support isn't great (I've had a similar challenge but it was eventually resolved), google support is worse (a similar challenge, eventually denied).
bozhark
Do the American thing: sue them
ksenzee
You’d probably find you’d “signed” a “contract” with them that contains a binding arbitration clause.
db48x
Seriously. Unless people sue them they’ll just keep doing it. Sue them for the lost photos at least.
dylan604
Don't they have weasel words in the ToS or EULA or somewhere that says you accept all risk of using service and protects the provider of any thing to be sued over?
account-5
This and the many other stories like this is why none of these companies has any of my data.
EndsOfnversion
Microsoft. Microsoft never changes.
jackdawipper
US is full of shitty corporates
Animats
This creates a new concern. Is it still safe to host projects that compete with Microsoft on Github? The answer may be no.
thewebguyd
The time for that concern was way back when Microsoft acquired github. Instead of moving elsewhere, everyone just doubled down on making github the defacto place to host our most critical open source infrastructure.
How many times do we as a community have to get bit by Microsoft before we learn?
arp242
These platforms constantly ban people for inscrutable reasons without any recourse, except perhaps for "support by media attention". I see no reason to assume this is any different, and that the ban is unrelated to their work on LibreOffice or anything else.
GitHub (and GitHub accounts) do not seem to have this problem as near as I can tell. For better or worse, I've found that reporting spammers and bad faith actors is a largely a pointless exercise as it will all go in a black hole.
cptaj
Large marketplace platforms need to be regulated to have due process.
When hundreds or thousands of companies live and die by your platform, you can't just close accounts arbitrarily.
Either that or you get split up for monopoly. Take your pick, but this shit doesn't work
1) I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that it's just an automated process that is misfiring.
2) I cannot prove that this (opaque) process has been retrofitted to use LLM's in its decision making, but I would not be the slightest bit surprised. Neural networks are, intrinsically, even more opaque than the processes they replace.
3) Using Big Tech as a place to backup your work/files/etc. is fine, as long as you have a local copy, and sometimes you have no choice but to deal with them. However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time. Plan (as best you can) accordingly.