Microsoft Locked Out VeraCrypt, WireGuard, and Windscribe from Pushing Windows Updates

Microsoft has had a complicated relationship with the open source world. VSCode, TypeScript, and .NET are all projects it created, and its acquisition of GitHub put it in charge of the world's largest code hosting platform.

But it is also the same company that bakes telemetry into Windows by default and has been aggressively pushing Copilot AI into every corner of its software. That last part especially has been nudging a growing number of people toward open alternatives.

And now, a wave of developer account suspensions has given some open source developers a new headache.

What's happening?

Microsoft rolled out mandatory account verification for all partners enrolled in the Windows Hardware Program who had not completed verification since April 2024. The requirement kicked in on October 16, 2025, giving partners 30 days from notification to verify their identity with a government-issued ID.

Plus, that ID has to match the name of the Partner Center primary contact. Miss the deadline or fail verification, and your account gets suspended with no further submissions allowed.

This matters because signing Windows kernel drivers requires one of these accounts. Without it, developers cannot push driver-signed updates for Windows, and Windows will flag unsigned drivers, blocking them from loading at the kernel level.

Three major open source projects found this out the hard way. VeraCrypt, WireGuard, and Windscribe all had their developer accounts suspended, cutting off their ability to ship updates on Windows.

VeraCrypt developer Mounir Idrassi was the first to go public. In a SourceForge forum post, he wrote that Microsoft had terminated his account with no prior warning, no explanation, and no option to appeal.

Repeated attempts to reach Microsoft through official channels got him nothing but automated replies. The suspension hit his day job too, not just VeraCrypt.

WireGuard creator Jason Donenfeld hit the same wall a couple of weeks later, when he went to certify a new WireGuard kernel driver for Windows and found his account showing as access restricted. He eventually tracked down a Microsoft appeals process, but it carried a 60-day response window.

Windscribe's situation was arguably the messiest. The company says it had held a verified Partner Center account for over eight years and spent more than a month trying to sort things out before going public.

Moreover, once an account is suspended, Partner Center blocks users from opening a support ticket directly.

What now?

This eventually got Microsoft's attention as Scott Hanselman, VP and Member of Technical Staff at Microsoft and GitHub stepped in on X to say the accounts would be fixed. He pointed to the October 2025 blog post (linked earlier) and said the company had been sending emails to affected partners since then.

Scott confirmed he had personally reached out to both Mounir and Jason to get their accounts unblocked, and that fixes were already in progress.

Anyway, this doesn't look good, and leaving developers of critical security software without recourse for weeks only erodes trust. But, in the end, this won't really affect a behemoth like Microsoft, who has a dominating hold on the operating system market.

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It's FOSSSourav Rudra