Sole Global Administrator locked out (MFA on a departed employee’s phone) - need tenant admin recovery via the Data Protection teamWe are a small business on a direct Microsoft 365 (Apps for business) subscription and have lost admin access to our tenant.

I will answer you in English based on your previous message. As a friendly suggestion, posting in French may help your question reach a wider audience and increase the chances of receiving assistance from other community members. 

Please note that this forum is a community support space, so I don’t have the ability to access tenant data or perform actions such as resetting MFA/security information directly. I can only guide you based on documented processes and experience, but I will do my best to point you in the right direction so this can be resolved properly.

Dear @Pierre GINESTE,

Thank you for providing such a clear and detailed description of the situation.

Based on the information you've shared, I believe you have correctly identified this as a tenant administrator recovery scenario rather than a simple password or MFA issue. Since the only known Global Administrator has left the company, MFA is tied to a personal device that is no longer accessible, and there are no alternative administrators or break-glass accounts available, recovery will likely require Microsoft's involvement after an ownership verification process.

It's also helpful that you control the public DNS zone and can provide subscription and billing evidence. Those are exactly the types of details that may help establish ownership during the recovery process.

Since you are unable to access the affected tenant and have had difficulty progressing through the normal support channels, you may want to consider creating a temporary Microsoft 365 trial tenant. This tenant would not provide access to your locked environment, but it would allow you to access the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and open a support request

Please follow this link to create a trial tenant: Compare Office 365 Enterprise Pricing and Plans | Microsoft 365 - after that you will be able to access to Microsoft 365 Admin Center to raise the ticket

Assuming that you have already created an account after registering a free trial and you can go to Microsoft 365 admin center and click Support > Help & support icon to raise your ticket. The agent will be able to create a ticket for you under the affected tenant and then transfer this ticket to Data Protection team who could help you to regain access.

Please mention that you are raising ticket on behalf of the affected tenant that you do not have access to. The support team will help you to create ticket on the affected tenant then later on the Microsoft Data Protection team will assist you.

Note: This process will take more time than usual (7-14 working days) for your account to get access again as Data Protection is always overwhelmed with the number of tickets.

If you do create the trial and it resolves the issue, please remember to cancel the subscription afterward to avoid any related charges. This new trial tenant will not give you access to any of the data or settings in your original locked tenant. It is solely a temporary means to contact Microsoft support.   

I hope my information is helpful. Please give me any updates once you get this resolved.

Warm regards,  

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