April 19th, 2026
Both, the lead maintainers of VeraCrypt and Wireguard, wrote that the accounts they use to sign the releases of drivers had been terminated or suspended.
After some media coverage both accounts were reinstated.
The accounts of other security software was also suspended or terminated.
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This is the message Mounir Idrassi, the lead developer of VeraCrypt, posted on the forum where users discuss VeraCrypt:
Hi everyone,
I want to share an update following my absence over the past few months.
I have encountered some challenges but the most serious one is that Microsoft terminated the account I have used for years to sign Windows drivers and the bootloader. You can see below a screenshot of the message shown when I tried to sign in.
Microsoft did not send me any emails or prior warnings. I have received no explanation for the termination and their message indicates that no appeal is possible.
I have tried to contact Microsoft through various channels but I have only received automated replies and bots. I was unable to reach a human.
This termination impacts my work beyond VeraCrypt and has consequences for my daily job.
Currently I'm out of options.
Regarding VeraCrypt, I cannot publish Windows updates. Linux and macOS updates can still be done but Windows is the platform used by the majority of users and so the inability to deliver Windows releases is a major blow to the project.
I'm open to proposals and help. [1]
And a couple of messages from the lead maintainer of WireGuard:
This is the same problem I'm currently facing with WireGuard. No warning at all, no notification. One day I sign in to publish an update, and yikes, account suspended. Currently undergoing some sort of 60 days appeals process, but who knows. That's kind of crazy: what if there were some critical RCE in WireGuard, being exploited in the wild, and I needed to update users immediately? (That's just hypothetical; don't freak out!) In that case, Microsoft would have my hands entirely tied.
If anybody within Microsoft is able to do something, please contact me -- jason at zx2c4 dot com. [2]
And:
WireGuard has some big updates ready to go on Windows, our first on the platform in nearly 4 years. We've done some nice modernizations and improvements, fixed bugs, added features, updated the toolchain, and more. But our release is currently blocked by @Microsoft.
The recent thread on Hacker News encouraged me to write this up, rather than just grumbling to myself privately about it as I have the last two weeks.
I logged in to get the WireGuardNT driver signed -- a necessary step for driver authors -- and was greeted by this vague message that the account has been suspended. Looking further into it, it seems like they instituted an identity verification policy, didn't notify me about it, and then I guess they suspended accounts who didn't do the verification. So of course I did the ID card verification immediately, but now an appeal is necessary. The appeals process requires filing a support ticket, but filing a support ticket requires a non-suspended account... Catch-22, eventually resolved by filing one through Azure and getting it rerouted to the right department. That was two weeks ago. Now they've told me there's a 60 day appeal review period. Wish us luck! [3]
[...]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260410202929/https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/discussion/general/thread/9620d7a4b3/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20260409082249/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47686549
[3] https://xcancel.com/EdgeSecurity/status/2041872931576299888