A number of Nexus users have recently logged support tickets with the Service Desk regarding a repeating cycle of logon authentication requests in Outlook. Similarly affected users may receive an error stating ‘You need the internet for this’ even when they are self-evidently connected and online.
Investigation has shown that – generally but not exclusively – this seems to affect users running versions of Office downloaded from the Nexus365 portal, and who are running Windows 10 as their operating system.
ITSS advice and things to try:
- Under Settings>Accounts>Access Work or School, remove any reference to an OnTheHub or personal Microsoft account.
- Ensure that your local firewall, antivirus software, and/or Windows Defender are not blocking processes that engage in authentication token acquisition.
- Removing stored accounts from Credentials Manager, and rebuilding Outlook’s profile may also help.
- There is a registry fix which can resolve this issue. However as the issue is due to be patched early in 2019 if you use this solution we strongly recommend you schedule to reverse it once the fix is released. With that borne in mind:
Starting from build 16.0.7967, Office switches from Azure Active Directory Authentication Library authentication (ADAL) to Web Account Manager (WAM) for sign-in workflows on Windows builds later than 15000 (Windows Version 1703, build 15063.138). The workaround is to disable WAM by modifying the following key:[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity\
“DisableADALatopWAMOverride”=dword:00000001