[German]This week an administrator contacted me, reporting sudden connection issues with Microsoft 365 and Outlook apps. After I've published a German blog post about that observation, other German users confirmed these connection issues.
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Microsoft 365 connection issues
Philipp K. contacted us directly by email because there are problems with the Microsoft 365 installations today. In his environment, on the morning of March 20, 2024, there was the phenomenon that errors occurred on several Microsoft 365 installations where employees wanted to log in again. The reader describes the error by stating that an "Outlook lost connectivity" message appeared and a red exclamation mark was displayed. In addition, according to Microsoft Outlook, there was no longer a connection to Exchange in the event of an error.
The message appeared when Microsoft Outlook was restarted or the message "Password required" appeared at the bottom of the Outlook window – although a password change was not pending.
The blog reader wrote: n the current case, clicking on "Enter password" and clicking on Sign in now in an Office Portal login window fixed the problem again. Has anyone from the readership observed a similar effect (I have written recently about a similar observation in my blog post Microsoft 365: Login error 700003).
Other readers confirmed the observation within my German blog post Microsoft 365-Verbindungsprobleme: Outlook zeigt rotes Ausrufezeichen – Workaround für Outlook-Suchproblem. Reader Peter wrote:
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We have problems with the SSO for the Teams desktop app, a quarter of the users can no longer log in here. However, the SSO in the browser apps works perfectly.
Another user commented also, that a number of users in his company are affected. The use Office 365 with Teams. The users are logged out in the entire Office 365 apps and in Teams. After deleting the usual caches in Microsoft 365, logging in again via the web and rebooting, the login screen reappeared with a 2FA prompt. It is interpreted as single sign on (SSO) problems. More users has confirmed this observation.
One user wrote, that Microsoft has announced changes in single sign on due to requirements on European Digital Markets Act (see Upcoming changes to Windows single sign-on from December 2023). But there is no confirmation from Microsoft.
On user wrote, that some users received the error "No network connection
Check your network settings and try again. [2604]". After they checke the internet connection under "Internet options -> Advanced", the found that "Use TLS 1.0" was suddenly checked. After they set the checkmark to "Use TLS 1.2" and removed the TLS 1.0 connection, SSO worked again.
A workaround proposed
Achim wrote, that many of his customers have had this issue. He established this workaround:
- Close all M365 apps, open Word,
- Then go to File -> Office Account.
A yellow field with "Sign-in needs to be repaired" was then displayed on the left-hand side. Clicking on this opened the login, which then worked perfectly. All apps, including Outlook, could then be opened again and everything worked as usual. Only Teams needed a little more attention on some systems; simply logging out and back in was enough.
