“A miserable incompetence”: Microsoft brutally banished a LibreOffice developer, without reason or appeal

Mike Kaganski, pillar of the LibreOffice project, saw his Microsoft account locked without valid explanation after sending a simple technical email. What could have been an isolated incident actually reveals the faults – even arrogance – of an opaque automated system, where the user is powerless in the face of the absurdity of the algorithm.

Microsoft blocks a LibreOffice developer: a banishment without appeal or explanation

Mike Kaganski is far from being an unknown: active developer at LibreOffice, he has been contributing to one of the few alternatives credible to Microsoft Office for years. On Monday, July 22, while he is about to send a technical message on the Dispute list for LibreOffice developers, his mail client returns an error. An attempt to return later, his Microsoft account is purely and simply blocked.

No warning, no explanation. And above all, no valid recovery method. “There was no violation of service conditions in my email, I am sure. I was probably reported by a bot”he explains. The continuation borders on the digital kafka.

The call? A journey of the digital fighter, where you are asked for a phone number, and then answer you: “Try another method”. Except that this other method does not exist. Access to the support? Possible only by connecting to your account – blocked, of course. Mike quips:

“Here is a page for connection problems. You have tried our FAQs? Still no connection? No worries! Contact our support, and we will settle it in one minute! But first, connect.”

After using his wife’s Microsoft account to transmit a detailed ticket, he receives an automatic response asking him … to go to the connection page. The very one that prevents him from moving forward from the start. His ticket is finally marked as “resolved”, without concrete action. And his account remains inaccessible.

Microsoft, algorithmic arbitrariness?

Mike is not an isolated case. On Reddit, another user, U/DEUS03690, evoked “A Kafkai black hole” when Microsoft had brutally erased him 30 years of personal files on OneDrive ::

“30 years of photos and irreplaceable work on OneDrive, flights. Microsoft replied ten days later by promising to help me ‘at each stage’, then nothing.”

The whole thing comes in a tense context, where LibreOffice accuses Microsoft of locking its file formats to slow the competition. A strategy which, according to some players in free software, aims to maintain artificial dependence on Microsoft products. However, the lines move: The city of Lyon recently announced its visit to LibreOffice In his administrations, thus breaking with a long tradition of Microsoft tools. A strong signal, at a time when communities seek to regain control of their data and budgets.