[German]A German blog reader just notified me about a problem with Microsoft Exchange Online that he was facing suddenly with Microsoft Outlook (from Office 365). A solution that had been running smoothly for years suddenly is causing issues, when synchronizing between Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Online. The error 0x8004011D (disconnected) was reported. With the help of Microsoft support, the problem could be solved – multifactor authentication played a role.
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Outlook synchronization suddenly fails
Alexander Jacubowsky, a German blog reader, recently encountered a crude issue as a service provider for one of his customers. The synchronization between Microsoft Outlook and a Microsoft Exchange online mailbox, which had been working for years, suddenly went on strike. To this he wrote:
Hi,
a very mysterious error has been plaguing me a bit the last few days. An Exchange Online account set up at a customer's site worked perfectly fine for years and then suddenly it stopped working.
He notes that Microsoft Outlook always showed only "disconnected". He then took Microsoft Outlook offline and then reset it to online. However, this did not help, nor did an account repair, etc. When trying to synchronize manually, after some time, the somewhat ominous error message 0x8004011D appeared in the Outlook message transfer window.
The above screenshot says Error 0x8004011D when running the task "xxxx": "The server is not available. If this condition persists, please contact your administrator. The error code says, that Microsoft Outlook cannot connect to the server in question with the mailbox. On Microsoft Answers, for example, there is this forum post from 2019 that deals with this error. There, a broken profile was the cause. From Nov. 2021, there is this article with some general troubleshooting advice. Similar solutions are suggested by this post. And there is, for example, this article, which also contains some general hint..
Alexander wrote: A search for this error message on the internet brought up x different causes. But none of them were somehow applicable, because mostly it was about Exchange Server local.
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And there was another observation: This user account could not be set up as an Exchange Online/Office365 account on any other PC either. According to Alexander in his mail, only such great error messages like "the name could not be found" came up. Of course this was completely misleading, because the domain settings and autodiscover were all completely correct. Exchange Online via web browser also worked perfectly fine. So the account itself was actually fine.
And the root cause is MFA
A support request from Alexcander to Microsoft brought a tip: He should check the multi factor authentication. Alexander wrote about this:
Yes, this [MFA] was active and set to mandatory. I simply set the multifactor authentication here once to disabled, and lo and behold everything suddenly works again.
The account could be set up again, respectively the old account works again.
Now I have activated the multifactor authentication again, and lo and behold, when logging in again, the authentication via second factor works completely without any problems.
So an absolutely unbelievable little problem: Small cause, big effect. And there one searches oneself once again correctly the wolf.
At this point I would like to thank Alexander Jacubowsky for the hint. Maybe it will help one or the other person concerned.
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