Unable to use your gift card balance for payments?

As it seems Microsoft has made some changes to their payment system, which results in unusable gift card balance on your account. If you are affected by this change and if you are not able to use your pre-activated gift cards in any country, this may can happen because you don't have added any alternative payment instrument for those countries. If this is by mistake or if Microsoft made these changes on purpose is not clear at the moment. So if you're having trouble accessing your balance, just add a credit card or possibly PayPal for those countries (even if you don't want to use your alternate method). It just has to "be there".

If you don't own a credit card or anything similar which can be added, you should go with any virtual card, which are available all over the internet. You don't have to add balance to this card. It's just a "ghost card".

After adding an alternate payment instrument, you should be able to use your gift card balance without any hassle.

EDIT: It's possibly enough if you just add a billing address for that specific country!