Microsoft's Devices, Find My Device, Lock Screens Are Completely Irresponsive

1 point

8 years ago

My father's got his business laptop stolen from his car. My best bet was Microsoft's Find My Device. For straight 4-5 hours or more, I've been constantly trying to do this ridiculously simple thing, and the followings are my estimated success rates:

1. View registered devices to the Microsoft account (https://account.microsoft.com/devices), 5%

2. View device page for laptop, 5%

3. View Find My Device tab on laptop's device page, 5%

4. Get the device locked via Lock button modal window, 0%

I'm not asking for a miracle. It's a feature available for devices registered to Microsoft account. It's a emergency security feature, and it doesn't work right now. I'm disappointed to say the least. The idea is cool, the feature would be useful. Just because the interface is horribly crippled, unusable, dysfunctional, it is all a junk, rubbish, a joke.

The error I get for the 95% of the time failures for the 1, 2 and 3 is: "Try refreshing the page, something's wrong on our side." You really can reach to the page just by refreshing, around 20 times. It is completely stupid how being stubborn helps resolving this.

The error I get all the time for the 4th step is: "Try again later, cannot reach your device right now", as far as I remember, because I couldn't reach the page for over 30 minutes trying. It is unbelievable, incredible, bizarre how Microsoft does not repeat the lockdown request by itself until they manage to reach to the device, expecting me to try it day and night, getting so lucky to hit the probably-narrow timespan where they will try and power-up and connect the device to the internet.

All the other Microsoft account pages I have tried work just fine. Only this critically important emergency feature page works like the cheap web pages from 1999 on a dial-up modem.

All I can say is, forget about the Find My Device feature offered by Microsoft, as if it has never existed. It is a true false-sense-of-security feature, void, worse than nothing.