deleting a Microsoft account linked to an Azure free trial

After a month of the free trial, an email reminded me to upgrade to 'pay as you go' and add a payment method (credit card) to continue to use the free services for a year. I did so. But I did not have much use for the free trial - I had tested it out for downloading from 1and1's cloud platform IONOS which some collaborators had used, and which was timing out using BSNL fiber due to downloading at around 30 Mbps. Similarly, Google Drive shared files also would time out after an hour or so.

I had found that the workaround of using rclone was a better and easier alternative to (a) create a free trial (b) create a VM (c) download on the VM (d) download from the VM to my local machine. 

So, when I got an email from Microsoft saying that all Azure logins would need multi-factor authentication (MFA), I thought I would just delete the Azure free trial subscription and the associated microsoft account.

For this, 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1526477/how-to-delete-my-azure-account

and Microsoft account -

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/account-billing/how-to-close-your-microsoft-account-c1b2d13f-4de6-6e1b-4a31-d9d668849979

 

Just going to the 'close account' link in the above support page, first tried after 'Cancel'ling the Azure subscription. Apparently, that is not enough. 30 minutes after we 'cancel' the subscription, a 'Delete' subscription button become active - we have to 'Delete' the subscription.

 

It is only after we delete the azure subscription that we can exit the tenant - had to delete tenant and not exit the tenant because this account was the sole user and hence the 'Global Administrator' for this tenant - before it allowed to close microsoft account -
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/users/directory-delete-howto

 

After the 'delete microsoft account' page completed, it just dropped me into login.live.com which asks me to log in - no confirmation page that the account has been marked for deletion etc.

If I try to log in with the account marked for deletion, it says that this account is marked for deletion, and logging in will unmark it for deletion, so we need to choose 'Cancel'.  

 

So, in short, the steps were:

1. Cancel the subscription from Azure portal

2. Wait 30+ minutes, then delete the subscription from Azure portal

3. Wait for a few minutes for their servers to update, then delete the tenant from Entra Admin Centre

4. (Wait a few minutes for their servers to update?), then delete the microsoft account from the link on the support page.