BitLocker locked my external harddrive by itself?!

This exact same problem happened to me today, but I was thankfully able to resolve it and wanted to share in case it is helpful to others. 

I was using my external hard drive this morning and everything was fine.  This afternoon, all of a sudden, it was locked, and was requesting that I enter a 48-digit recovery key, even though I had never set up encryption or even heard of Bitlocker before, similar to the other posters above. 

After almost having a meltdown, as I have years of research and articles saved in there, I did a google search for "microsoft support unlocking bitlocker." That took me to a page on support.microsoft.com that gave me different options, including "find my bitlocker recovery key".  Then, from there, I logged into my microsoft.com account, at which point it asked me to verify my account by retrieving a code sent to my email account.  After that, it took me to a page listing my devices and corresponding recovery keys.  Each recovery key had a "key ID" next to it.  I looked for the one that matched the "key ID" that was listed in the prompt to enter the recovery key.  I pasted that recovery key into the box.  I had to do it several times before it worked, but it indeed unlocked my external hard drive.  (I noticed that at least one time the paste function did not paste all 48 numbers so I manually checked to make sure all 48 were there and then it worked.)

I note that, even after unlocking it, the external hard drive locked itself again a few minutes later.  I was able to unlock it by entering the same key again.  I'm not sure how to stop the drive from locking by itself in the future, so will make regular back-ups of the contents of my external hard drive.

This issue is really a scandal and as usual Microsoft is not doing anything. Can someone post the link to their topic on technet if any ?

On this forum it is usually useless support as the agents are just able to redirect to the help page and do not understand our problems.

The issue happened to me an western digital usb 3.0 hdd, on Windows 10 HOME (yes the edition WITHOUT bitlocker nor bitlocker to go features, so how the **** did bitlocker locked the drive ?)

How does Microsoft find itself as a company? These are not working systems and there is no repair. This in also a legal issue, is it not? Why is Microsoft incapable to solve problems and do it even try?

I have the exact same problem, waiting for a solution...

Same problem discovered a few days ago. Absolutely, positively did NOT enable BitLocker myself, did not create password, etc. The categorical statements repeated above to the effect that BitLocker cannot be locked except by a user are clearly inaccurate. 

Has a solution (or even an acknowledgement of the problem) been posted anywhere yet? I checked the resouces linked above and found nothing helpful. 

Could we possibly move beyond denial and turfing? An acknowledgement of the problem and some evidence of substantive engagement with it would be much appreciated.