Via The Register:

Readers have flooded our mailboxes with reports that Microsoft 365 Family licensing has fallen over this morning, so those of you who provide tech support to relatives or those using the office suite for a small business, consider yourself warned.

Microsoft’s Service Health page says a “licensing issue” is causing users with Family subscriptions to be unable to open their Office suite. Problems started around 1100 UTC this morning, with fully paid up and licensed shared users seeing the message “Your subscription expired,” while others say they are seeing the message “your subscription has been canceled.”

And multiple people in the comments said something like “I didn’t notice any problems with LibreOffice today.”

Microsoft 365, for those few of you who’ve missed it, is what Microsoft is pushing instead of Microsoft Office these days. It’s a lot like Microsoft Office except that it’s a subscription service; the Family plan, the one that stopped letting people use their locally installed word processors, is $12.99 a month or $129.99 a year.

(The most recent version of Microsoft Office goes for $150, so if you need the Microsoft product (instead of something like LibreOffice) but don’t plan on replacing it annually and don’t need the cloud storage… I don’t know. How many workplaces mandate this subscription, or buy it in bulk?)

Microsoft reportedly “reverted the change” to whatever license-checking server they broke… about nine hours later.

 

If you’ve ever detected an undertone of scorn in people’s discussions of Microsoft products, shit like this is why. Well, this and every time a Windows update fucks with someone’s peripherals, and whole Windows versions like Vista and 8 being dismissed as crapware, and more recent Windows versions filling up with ads for overpriced and apparently unreliable pseudo-products like 365…