Access to Admin Center

Hi @Sandra Schumacher, 

Thank you for reaching out regarding the difficulties your organization is experiencing with the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Based on your inquiry, it appears that your organization is facing a loss of administrative access, preventing the priest in charge and all other people from managing your business subscription. 

Because this issue involves administrative privileges and specific account-level security, I need to handle the next steps with extra care. To ensure our forum’s compliance and to keep your sensitive information fully protected, I would like to move this discussion to a private message. 

Moving to a private channel allows me to safely troubleshoot the specific account credentials used to log in to the Admin Center. This way, I can verify the account status and explore recovery options in detail without any risk to your data privacy on a public forum. 

I have already initiated a private message for you. Please click on this button to open the private message so we can dive into the specifics and get your access restored as quickly as possible.

I look forward to helping you get this resolved.

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

If no one in the organization can access the Microsoft 365 admin center, the next step is to identify or involve an administrator and, if necessary, work with Microsoft support to restore access.

1. Identify who should be the admin
   • By default, the person who originally signed up for and bought the Microsoft 365 for business subscription is the admin.
   • In a church or similar organization, this is often the business owner, finance/office manager, IT volunteer, or the person who originally set up email/accounts.
   • If unsure, ask whoever provided the user accounts and passwords or who manages billing for Microsoft 365.
2. If the priest (or intended admin) cannot access the admin center
   • If the priest signs in and sees a message like “You don't have permission to access this page or perform this action,” that account is not an admin.
   • In that case, someone else in the organization is the admin and must either:
     • Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center (https://portal.microsoft.com), and
     • Assign an admin role to the priest’s account so they can manage Microsoft 365.
3. If truly no one has admin access (admin left or lost access)
   • When there is no remaining admin (for example, the original admin left, or is locked out by MFA), the organization must work with Microsoft support/Data Protection to recover the tenant.
   • Use the regional Customer service phone numbers from Microsoft Support and clearly state:
     • This is a Microsoft 365 for business (company/church) account.
     • There is no current administrator who can sign in.
     • A tenant admin recovery / MFA reset is required.
   • Follow the guidance in the referenced Q&A posts: call the business support line, choose options for business/technical support, confirm it is a company account, and request a service ticket with the Data Protection team to restore or assign admin access.
4. If the admin is locked out due to MFA (Authenticator, phone lost, etc.)
   • If there is another global admin, that person can reset the locked-out admin’s MFA in Microsoft Entra ID.
   • If there is only one admin and that admin is locked out, the Data Protection team must reset the authentication methods after verifying identity, using the phone-support process described above.

Until an admin account is recovered or newly assigned, no one will be able to access the Microsoft 365 admin center or manage subscriptions, users, or billing.

References:

• Overview of the Microsoft 365 admin center
• Access the admin centers
• Requesting a Tenant Admin MFA Reset - Microsoft Q&A
• I cant log in to my business account because it is requiring Authenticator app which I do not have - Microsoft Q&A
• I have a Micrsoft business account and I am the admin and the only user registered under this account. I can't log in because i have replaced my phone and the authenticator doesn't work. - Microsoft Q&A
• Global Admin Locked out - Microsoft Q&A
• Microsoft authenticator sending me into a spiral - Microsoft Q&A