Sysadmin needing a place to vent, record work, and maybe even help others along the way!

1 minute read

Today I came into the office to a spate of calls from people being unable to access their emails (Office 365), some unable to access them on Outlook on Windows, and some just unable to access emails on mobile phones. Tt was a random selection of apps constantly asking for credentials, and looping when the credentials were put in. It was first thing in the morning, and I hadn’t had a coffee yet, so this definitely woke me up.

Troubleshooting

Maybe it would be easier for me to list some of the steps we took to troubleshoot:

  • Try resetting passwords
  • Try creating new profiles on outlook
  • Try office repairs
  • Try to roll back windows updates which had installed after patch tuesday this week

After looking into the issue for a bit, we found that the affected apps were Outlook 2013, Samsung Email, Apple Mail, and Gmail.

Actual Issue

Unfortunately, none of the troubleshooting steps worked so I posted in /r/sysadmin on Reddit, and they very kindly informed me that Microsoft has now disabled Basic Authentication for O365 and has now switched to Modern Authentication. Either I missed the notification for that or I never had it!

Outlook 2013 does not support Modern Auth by default which explains why that wasn’t working, and now you have to go to the Azure portal on O365 admin and grant admin approval to the mobile apps to allow them to work.

Solution

The solutions for our email problems were as follows:

  • Outlook 2013 – We had to add three windows registry entries to allow Outlook 2013 to use Modern Auth, see link no.1 in the reference section below!
  • Mobile Email apps – For this we had to log onto the Office 365 Azure admin portal, go into ‘Enterprise Applications’ and search for (each individually) Samsung Email, IOS Apps, and Gmail. Once you click into the app you click ‘Grant Admin Approval’. You then have to re-enter the O365 credentials on the users’ devices to get them to work again. See reference no.2 below!

Conclusion

In conclusion, make sure you constantly keep up to date with Microsoft changes, and ensure you prepare properly for them…like I should have! and also make sure you check out the Sysadmin subreddit if you are working in IT, you get some great advice on there and good banter too!

Thank you for reading!

References

  1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/security-and-compliance/enable-modern-authentication?view=o365-worldwide
  2. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/microsoft-and-apple-working-together-to-improve-exchange-online/ba-p/3513846
  3. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients-and-mobile-in-exchange-online/deprecation-of-basic-authentication-exchange-online

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