Thanks for the heads up on the Microsoft Azure outage! However, I also went a bit further and
- visited https://portal.azure.com and
clicked "SQL databases" on the
navigation bar at left (I think that leads to
https://portal.azure.com/#blade/HubsExtension/Resources/resourceType/Microsoft.Sql%2Fservers%2Fdatabases).
Under the Subscription column at far right of the table that
subsequently appeared, I saw a link titled "(Disabled) Free Trial".
Clicking on that led to a Subscription Preview screen that stated
that, "This account is on a deprecated billing system. Ask the
Account Admin, @, to contact Support to move
it to the new system."
Thus, it seems the problem stems from the fact that the Azure account was started using a company credit card that was recently canceled (the account owner just left the company). We just had to correct that situation by updating the credit card information and then switching the account admin (see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/billing/billing-subscription-transfer). Other folks in the organization handled that.
Postscript:
I ended up becoming involved in the administrative portion of this exercise due to the fact that even after transferring ownership of the subscription to the new account admin user in the company, the resource group, database server, and database still would not show up under that admin's Azure portal. Microsoft techies thought the system needed time to propagate the changes but then I ventured on to learn that I also had to individually set the new account admin as both an Owner and as a Co-administrator under the "Account control (IAM)" screen. To get there, in the Azure portal,
- Choose All services and then Subscriptions
- Choose your subscription
- Choose Access control (IAM)
Click Add In the Add permissions screen that follows,
a. set the Role to "Owner"
b. set the Assign access field to "Azure AD user, group, or application"
c. find the new account admin user in the list titled Select
d. click Save
Then back on the "Access control (IAM)" screen, right-click (or click the dot/ellipsis menu to the right of) the new account admin's name and select "Add as co-administrator"
Finally, visit https://account.azure.com/Subscriptions and
a. click on your newly transferred subscription's hyperlink
b. click "Edit subscription details"
c. On the pop-up titled "Make it yours", change the SERVICE ADMINISTRATOR e-mail to the new account admin's e-mail
Much of the above is also documented at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/billing/billing-add-change-azure-subscription-administrator.
