I recently assisted a client that was having logon issues with their Office 365 services. The particular problem that the client was encountering was that their account was completely locked out, due to too many failed logon attempts. Usually, the fix for this issue is to issue a password reset on the affected account from the administrator account (as Microsoft’s own support site suggests). However, even with password resets, the affected account was still blocked.
Since the main Office 365 website admin panel is extremely limited (thanks Microsoft), I turned to good old Google for answers. After doing a bit of online research, I eventually found a solution to the account block issue, using some PowerShell commands. Connecting to an Office 365 account via PowerShell wasn’t terribly difficult, thanks to this excellent guide on Phil Wicklund’s blog:
http://blog.philwicklund.com/fff/2011/08/using-remote-powershell-to-manage-office-365-identities.html
After getting my PowerShell environment setup, I was able to unblock the affected account easily, via this command:
Unblock a Office 365 Account: Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName USERNAME@YOURDOMAIN –blockcredential $false
After issuing the command, the affected user was able to logon immediately after. Problem quickly resolved, courtesy of PowerShell.