Azure For Students Subscriptions - "Your email domain is not currently registered with us"

Hello,

I am a teacher at a vocational school and we are experiencing a recurring issue with Azure for Students academic verification, affecting multiple students at the same time.

Our school setup (for context)

Our institution is structured as follows:

• We have a student domain that is registered and whitelisted with Microsoft as an academic domain, for example:
• email address removed for privacy reasons
• We also have a separate organisational domain used for staff and business operations, for example:
• email address removed for privacy reasons

Students are instructed to:

Sign in to Azure using their personal Microsoft account (typically Outlook/Hotmail)

• Use their school email address only for academic verification during the Azure for Students sign-up flow
• This setup has worked historically, but we are now seeing repeated failures.

The issue we are seeing

• Students complete CAPTCHA and email verification successfully.
• The process then fails with:
• “Sorry, your academic status could not be verified.” or similar
• This happens even when:
  • Students use a private/incognito browser session
  • VPNs and ad blockers are disabled
  • Only one Microsoft account is signed in
  • No account switching occurs during the flow
• The issue affects multiple students from the same institution, often within the same timeframe.
• Because Azure for Students verification appears to allow only one attempt, students who fail once are effectively blocked and end up in a support loop.

Observations

Based on volume and timing, this does not appear to be individual user error.

We suspect one or more of the following:

• A backend verification or account-linking issue
• An institutional configuration mismatch that is not clearly surfaced
• A generic or outdated error message that does not accurately reflect the real cause of failure

At this point, I am not fully convinced that the error message always represents a true eligibility problem.

What we are hoping to learn

1. Are other schools using a similar setup (personal Microsoft account + separate student email domain for verification)?
2. Are there known best practices or preferred configurations for institutions with multiple domains?
3. Is there guidance we can pass on to our IT team to improve compatibility with Azure for Students verification?
4. Is there a way for failed verifications to be reviewed or reset when the institution and domain are valid?

Our goal is not just to fix individual cases, but to understand whether our institutional setup could be improved to prevent this issue going forward.

Any insight from Microsoft staff or other educators would be greatly appreciated. 

RobinLBaldwin​ 

Mahlah_Murray​