"Looks like this invitation link is not working"

Anonymous
2023-11-08T06:12:00+00:00

I sent my friends an invitation to share my Office 365 account (5 users). When they opened an email and clicked link it's showed "Looks like this invitation link is not working, You'll need contact the person who invited you and ask them to shar the subscription with you". But some can join invitation link. What's happening with some e-mail?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Subscription, account, billing | For education | Other

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Anonymous
2023-11-24T17:43:06+00:00

In response to the following error I have figured out the solution:

"Looks like this invitation link is not working

You’ll need to contact the person who invited you and ask them to share the subscription with you"

Microsoft does not know the answer and neither does their Bing AI since this is an unresolved bug.

The problem will occur if the person you are attempting to share the subscription with is already a member of your family safety group.

While logged in to the account that is attempting to send the share go to https://account.microsoft.com/family/home

You will likely see the person in your list of family twice. One of them will be pending invitation.

Remove the person from your family group (not the one pending invitation). Once they are kicked out go ahead and accept the invitation for them using their account.

This should now work and they will be back in your family group. You will likely have to change any family sharing settings in Windows after all this and you may need to sign out of MS desktop apps and back in (for the added user).

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-05-25T15:30:28+00:00

    I have sent invitation email and link to my wife at mareum_******@hotmail.com.

    every time it appears that Looks like this invitation link is not working

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-04-21T08:12:05+00:00

    I am having the same issue. Cannot share my Family subscription with my husband and he has too much invested in his Microsoft account to potentially lose access to emails and documents. Microsoft help and support is useless and wastes time going around and around in circles for days and Microsoft live support does not exist. It appears the Family subscription works only when anyone invited has no Microsoft subscription at all and is starting up for the first time, therefore, for existing Microsoft subscriptions it appears that Microsoft is happy to take your money for a Family subscription as existing Microsoft users in a family will all need to pay for an individual Personal Microsoft subscription.

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  3. Anonymous
    2025-04-10T16:37:13+00:00

    I sent an invitation to my wife's email to share my Home Microsoft 365 account.

    She received the link and we did that 3 times. Each time the message, "looks like this invitation link is not working."

    I have gone to the subscription tab on account.microsoft.com as directed and there is NO option to click Start Sharing.

    The account renewed on April 5 and since then there has been this problem.

    Jeff B

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  4. Anonymous
    2025-02-02T23:03:47+00:00

    I've struggled for the past 2 days trying to add a friend to my new Family Share Office365 subscription. She previously had an Office356 subscription that just ended and whatever we did resulted in the share not working and the old account continued asking to be reactivated and paid for.

    I deactivated everything, uninstalled Office365, deleted credentials, removed User OneAuth and IdentityCache folders as well as Registry entries, rebooted ... nothing I did made any difference.

    The simple solution was to create a new Windows Account (Google "create a new Windows account") using a different email address (my friend has 2 Gmail addresses) and once the account was created it was added to Windows (Settings -> Accounts -> Email & Accounts -> Add a Work or School Account).

    After the new account was added (there are now two accounts listed) the sharing worked and everything installed perfectly. Seems that the problem was using a Microsoft Account that was previously used with another Office365 subscription. It refuses to let go even after the subscription has expired and wants the user to renew and pay for it again.

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