Active Directory Accounts Gets Disabled Automatically

Organizations use Microsoft Directory Service for centralized management of the Users and Resources. Logical structuring of Active directory can be achieved through Forests, Domains and Organizational Units. SME or Enterprise wide Organizations rely heavily on Organizational Unit as Security boundary and place their Users , configure policies and provide delegation of Authority.

Managing Active Directory is challenging and administrators might have encountered a scenario where the User accounts in a particular Organizational Unit or different Organizational Units gets automatically disabled.

This is not a default Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services behavior. Below are the only possibilities for the accounts being locked�

a) Manual disabling of User account�or User accounts

b) Schedule Task which triggers a Script to disable the User account / User accounts

b) Manual execution of WMI Script / Powershell Script to disable the User account or User accounts

To narrow down the root cause of the problem, following are the major steps which needs to be carefully reviewed and configured.


Administrators can configure Advance Security Audit policy to audit User Account Management. After successful configuration of Audit policy the following events gets registered under the Event log. Administrators can create Group Policy and configure the Audit policy or make changes to Default Domain Controller Policy to track the events.

Event ID : 4725

Event Message : A user account was disabled.


If there is no Event ID 4725 getting registered , administrators should verify the Event Log size.

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