I have no presence on X, don’t want to have a presence on X. Going to give it another day and see what the next response is. Thankfully I don’t have a customer waiting for a driver change currently.
Because it seems we needed to reverify with our parent company we created an account for them and we were told to upload the SignableFile.bin signed with our certificate.
When we did that we were told that the certificate was registered to our old account. So we logged in (including our Global Admin IT guy) and tried to remove the certificate from our old account. and the manage certificates link had gone from from our accounts there.
Back to Microsoft we go.
Well apparently they are now going to review my “evidence” and provide me a response “within approximately 60 days”. Not much of an “accelerated reinstatement experience” if it really takes that long. Will be great to have this whole ordeal done with.
Have you used the form posted by Scott above? I think it helps.
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@Bill_Zissimopoulos I did not since everything says to do that if you can’t submit a ticket. Though odd it optionally asks for any tickets you’ve opened at the end. I’ll give it a little time before resorting to that.
Highly suggest doing the form, I wouldn’t wait for additional information…Kinda sounds like you’re in the same “60 day limbo” we got to before making lots of noise. My understanding is that the expedited form is supposed to help this situation.
Well if @Scott_Noone_OSR says to do it then I suppose I should. Form submitted… with all 3 tickets I’ve had so far included.
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Well you can at least blame me if anyone accuses you of being annoying 
At the company where I work, we finally just got some success on this -- our Hardware account had been locked out for over a month, and we were stuck going round and round with Microsoft Support, chatbots etc. As of last night, we are now able to get into the Hardware portal again!
I think what finally got it working again for us was filling out the special 'expedited' request form which Microsoft added on 4/13. But, prior to using that form, we also did all of the following:
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We had originally signed up for the Hardware program using an "onmicrosoft-dot-com" account (aka Entra ID) without really knowing what that was -- I think whatever sign-up process we followed just ended up doing it that way. Now we had to go into Account Settings -> Legal Info (and I think we only had the Partner tab there initially, not the Developer tab) and we had to change our contact info to use an email address of the form “firstname-dot-lastname-at-company-dot-com” and the first and last name had to match the contact name.
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We verified that company email address and also had to set up 2FA on the account, since we weren't using that before. No issues there.
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Next, we solved the problem of not being able to create a support case (because you can't submit the form until you choose a Workspace, and we had no Workspaces in the drop-down list). We solved this by signing up for the AI Cloud Partner Program (AICPP). We don't do anything with Microsoft for AI or cloud stuff at this point -- this just enabled us to open a support case. After going through the signup for AICPP (which required our DUNS number and other business info), the AICPP program now appeared on our dashboard, and we were able to go back to the Help+Support page and finish filling out the form to create a support ticket to get the Hardware program reinstated.
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We got an email back from MS Support and went back and forth a couple of times. They wanted screen shots showing our contact name, account name and the Seller ID number under Account Settings -> Legal Info -> Developer. After a day or two, our Account Settings -> Legal Info -> Verification Summary page now showed a Resolve button. We clicked that and it led to the page to "Get or Present Your Verified ID" which is the AU10TIX procedure. We filled that out, and within a short time our Verification status changed to "Authorized" with a green checkmark. However, still no Hardware program.
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I replied back to the MS Support rep letting them know this, and at that point we stopped receiving email replies on our case - I discovered this after a few days by going into the Partner support page and looking at the case activity. I saw a reply there, followed by another message saying the support rep's message was rejected by Outlook (on Microsoft's side, I think -- we don't use Outlook for our email system). The upshot is: if you don't hear anything on your support case, check the website frequently! In my reply I included screen shots showing the vetting status under Legal Info -> Partner and Developer tabs now showed Authorized.
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We got no response on that for 4-5 days, and it was at that point I saw the posts here about the new form created to expedite the Hardware program reinstatement. We filled that out, and within 1 day our Hardware program finally appeared on our dashboard! (We haven't signed drivers yet, so I'm hoping it won't disappear again by Monday...)
Then we had to do a couple more steps which we might have had to do anyway:
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Accept an updated Windows logo agreement, under Account Settings -> Agreements;
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Update our company's EV certificate under Account Settings -> Manage Certificates (this item had disappeared when we went in last month, but reappeared once our Hardware program was reinstated).
So, I would say the special form probably did expedite this quite a bit, but I imagine it's also contingent on having the above steps completed before filling it out.
I hope this might help others, and huge thanks to everyone else who posted their experience here and in other similar threads -- we definitely would never have gotten this resolved without all that prior info!
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No idea if the form had an effect but my access to the Hardware program was restored this morning.
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Great news!
Did you receive a message from Garrett D? Then it was very likely the form.
Nope. Just a message from the same support person who said they would review and provide me a response within 60 days. So guessing they didn’t even get to my form yet.
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We just got an email from Garrett, so yeah I’m thinking it was the form that expedited it (again possibly/likely predicated on having the vetting and support case in place prior). They probably have a backlog of accounts to restore, but using the form might move you closer to the top of the pile…
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In the meantime Microsoft did what they said they would do and started blocking legacy drivers that were cross-signed in the past. Reports of customers and users not being able to start our product LatencyMon are dripping in.
The long term solution of course is to get an EV certificate and then access to the signing portal.
Since the time between the announcement and the realization of it was rather short, we hope that we can get our drivers whitelisted in the meantime.
I wanted to ask whether anyone else is experiencing this and whether anyone knows the right contacts or channels to request inclusion of our drivers in the explicit allow list of reputable legacy drivers.
I got an email back this morning from Microsoft (human) that said:
“Microsoft has suspended your Hardware Dev Center (HDC) account due to a determination of non‑compliance with the Hardware Program at the time of suspension. We may suspend your HDC account for non-compliance with one or more of the following:
• Required Hardware Program agreements have not been accepted.
• A valid Extended Validation (EV) code signing certificate is not on file.
• The account has a rejected vetting status.
• The account has been inactive for 12 months or more. “
Two of those bullet points are incorrect. We have a signed driver from October of last year so the account has not been inactive for 12 months or more.
In order to sign that driver it is obvious that we had an EV code signing certificate on file. Microsoft made it vanish along with the “Manage Certificates” option.
Secondly where are the Hardware Program agreements?
How can we have rejected vetting status when we have not subjected ourselves to vetting?
Finally email said:
“In order to have your account reinstated, we need to complete our review process regarding your account. Accordingly, we will review your request and provide a decision. Microsoft will use commercially reasonable efforts to notify you of the outcome within approximately 30 days. The decision to reinstate is made at Microsoft’s sole discretion. If your account is approved for reinstatement, you must resolve all compliance issues prior to regaining access to HDC.”
How do we achieve this? You took away our ability to manage certificates (and you made a perfectly valid EV certificate disappear. We have signed a file less than a year ago and what are the steps for vetting and where are the hardware program agreements?
@rob18767 - It sounds like that email was from Microsoft Support, not from Garrett or anyone on his team?
Did you fill out the new special form they set up to expedite getting these issues resolved? I recommend doing that ASAP if you haven't already. The link is in Scott's post #85 in this thread, at "forms-dot-cloud-dot-microsoft etc..." (I don't know how to post the full link in this forum). Submitting that form seemed to get us going in a day or so, after having gone back and forth with their support for weeks.
In your account settings -> Agreements are there any new agreements that need to be accepted? In our case, we didn't have these at first (after our account got deactivated) but they appeared later after Garrett and his team reinstated our Hardware account. Same with the "Manage certificates" item - it disappeared for us but then reappeared after our Hardware account was reinstated.
In your account settings -> Legal info, do you have both the Partner and Developer tabs? Under each one, does your verification status say Authorized? If not, it should have a link to the "Verification summary" page. If that has a Resolve button, try using that and see where it takes you. Otherwise, Garrett's team will probably have to reactivate it for you.
Maybe also read through my post #108 above and do whichever of those steps you can, if you haven't already done them, as I don't know which of those may have enabled Garrett's team to get our hardware account reactivated faster or with fewer steps.
One other thing - we originally set up 2 accounts on the MS portal - the account we use for driver signing, and a Global admin account. At this point, now our driver signing account is also marked as a Global Admin. While trying to get our hardware program back, I kept bouncing back and forth between the driver signing account and the global-admin account. I forget if I set up the driver signing account to also be a Global admin, or if it happened automatically somehow.
Anyway, you might need to be using an account marked as Global admin in order to get your hardware account reinstated. For us, under Account settings -> User management, our old Global admin user still has only the "Global admin" role; but our driver signing account now has "Global admin, Account admin, Referrals admin, Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program partner admin, Admin"... whatever all that means. Maybe you can add the necessary role(s) to your hardware account, if your company allows it.
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The company admin did. I am thinking of resending it myself.
There are no new agreements
In the Partner tab we have our Global Admin set to an email address to someone who is no longer at the company.
I want to add here that our global admin is at our parent company. so we have different domain names for the global admin and me, the developer.
There is someone still at our company who still has Global Admin rights so I am guessing we have to change this?
The Verification Summary page takes me nowhere so I guess I need that reactivated.
Anyhow thank you very much for this information. You have been a real help as have many people in this thread. Thank you all.
We have a login on the account which includes the onmicrosoft part of the email address .
the Partner and developer tabs show the domain names without the onmicrosoft part. When I sent the form you mentioned previously I included my email address without the onmicrosoft part (included seller ID) though in order to communicate with Microsoft.
Do we need to use the onmicrosoft email instead?
May I ask which form you could not submit? We have a support case and we submitted this f
Just got the email from Garrett. This looks promising.
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We have a relatively simple setup here, I guess - the same people (including me) have access to both the driver signing account and the Global Admin accounts. It's kind of a strange setup where we log in using the 'xxx-dot-onmicrosoft-dot-com' domain address, but the contact info on the account uses a real email address at our company. That email had to be verified again, and it needed to match the first/last name of the contact person also, probably for the AU10TIX vetting and/or because the 'onmicrosoft-dot-com' address can't receive email (or at least we have nowhere to read it, in our case).
May I ask which form you could not submit? We have a support case and we submitted this
Yes, that's the one that apparently goes to Garrett and his team, and gets things working much faster / more directly. Sounds like you're on the right track there. If it goes the way it did for us, you'll get new stuff under Account settings -> Agreements to sign, and your Manage certificates page will be back, in case you need to add/update your EV cert.
I condensed the issues we ran into and sent Garrett a list of them, and he said they are working on resolving all these problems people have been hitting.
For now, I learned my lesson and will be checking OSR and the Hardware Dev Center blog and Windows IT Pro blog frequently, to try to avoid any further surprises like this...
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