Microsoft has confirmed it’s investigating a widespread licensing problem that’s preventing some Microsoft 365 Family subscription customers from accessing their services, despite having active subscriptions.

Users across social media and Microsoft’s community forums report being locked out of their Microsoft 365 applications with error messages incorrectly claiming their subscriptions have expired. Affected customers are being prompted to renew subscriptions that are still active and were recently renewed.

“I checked my family manager’s account and the subscription is active and shared, but I got booted from my Word app and there’s no subscription showing in my account page,” one user reported.

Another customer noted: “I am still able to access my OneDrive files and to work on desktop installed apps of word and excel, the problem is mainly with outlook which has limited functionality now and tells me that I need to subscribe to Microsoft 365.”

Microsoft has acknowledged the issue on its Service Status portal and via Twitter, stating: “We’re aware of an issue impacting Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions. Users with Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions may be unable to access Microsoft 365 services.”

The company is currently reviewing service telemetry and recent system changes to identify the root cause of the problem.

This incident follows several recent Microsoft service disruptions, including a global outage that prevented administrators from accessing the Exchange Admin Center and two Exchange Online incidents last month that affected email functionality for Outlook web users.