Similar with Yahoo recently - had an almost 20 year old account, and suddenly it wants verification on a long gone phone number. Good that the account was used mostly for various registrations and non-critical communications. Still a lot of history and context de-facto gone. A kind of personal mini-Alexandria library fire :)

Similar situation with Hotmail went better - as the phone number was gone, the system offered an alternative - i had to provide previous passwords, recent emails recipients and subjects.