"(if this link isn’t live yet, give it a few more minutes and then try again)."
It's literally right after the link. What did you expect? It's a breaking story, the product was just announced and in the conference it was announced as available later today.
Personally I'd expect a "not live" link to fail to load, or be 404, or put up a "coming soon" page, or something. If I get a login page that indicates "live" to me.
More than a year ago I skipped the page that asked me to enable the two-factor authentication, as I didn't want to give Microsoft my phone number. One day I found myself completely locked out of my account. Long story short, I've never been able to access my email account again, since that day. The instructions to unblock the account [1], say, I shit you not:
If I try to enter my number, I get an unspecified error and I'm still locked out. Obviously. But not to worry, the page says:
>"If you can’t unblock your account with the security code and changing your password, customer support can still help you get your account back. To contact customer support, you’ll need to sign in to your account, and fill out an online form."
...
I really don't know what kind of brain-dead monkeys they put in charge of these things. And while it's hard to believe that a functioning human being could ever come up with such a bullet-proof procedure to unblock an account blocked for "security reasons", what really baffles me is that this has been going on for almost two years. This should give you an idea of how much Microsoft cares about their consumer products.
So, consider yourself lucky to have gone past the login, which, apparently, isn't something to take for granted with Microsoft.
https://account.live.com/resetpassword.aspx doesnt seem to require my password. I was able to select "I know my password, but can't log in" then chose "I don't have any of these" at which point I was given a form to fill out to have a CS rep contact me.
Give it a try, it might give you access to your account again.
It's what I did at the time, and I did it again now, but it doesn't work. I can change password as many times as I want, but the account is still blocked for no reason.
So you didn't get to the big contact form? Did you select the same things I did? I just tried it again on another account, and got the same page as before.
It is a bit strange that Microsoft keeps wanting me to log in for things like this. I'm not sure.
If any Microsoft engineers happen to be scanning this thread, it correctly redirected me to our organizations login page for me to use my standard credentials, but failed after with a generic Bad Request error.
Come on, MS.