Forum Discussion
M365 disconnects my Dropbox account every single day
I have been working from an iPad on a Word document stored in my Dropbox account for several years now. A few months ago, out of the blue Office started disconnecting my Dropbox account literally every single day. I tap Open in Word to open the doc, Dropbox opens up Word, and then nothing happens. I go into Settings->Files and Storage->Storage Accounts, and Dropbox is just gone.
I have to manually reconnect my Dropbox account literally every single day of my life. I have reported this issue over and over and over through Help->Tell Us What Can Be Better in Word iOS. Numerous app updates have been released since this problem started happening and absolutely nothing has been done to fix it.
24 Replies
I'm having this same issue and have gone through a useless round of troubleshooting at Dropbox and am now diving into troubleshooting with Microsoft Support. Has anyone had any luck with this? I did disable "Analyze Content" and "Download Content" in my privacy settings, because CoPilot was constantly interrupting my writing flow -- does anyone else having this problem have those settings enabled/disabled?
I am furious!
After reading all the replies that document exactly what I have also experienced makes me believe that Microsoft DOES NOT CARE about this issue at all. Since I am experiencing the same issue of having to “Allow” Microsoft access to my Dropbox account EVERY SINGLE DAY, I am fed up with Microsoft yet again.
Does anyone at Microsoft actually read these comments?
Are they trying to hide something?
How about some live person at Microsoft offer a long term solution to this issue?
MICROSOFT RESPOND NOW!
I've also seen Dropbox accounts mysteriously disappear from Word and Excel on iPad/iPhone almost daily—just like others here have mentioned. For years, everything worked seamlessly. But in the past few months, something clearly changed, and it seems to be affecting not just Dropbox, but also other third-party storage services like Egnyte (as Jimmyroot mentioned).
What’s puzzling is that this isn’t isolated to one platform or a single user. It looks like a broader issue—possibly tied to a policy shift, authentication timeout, or background app behavior in newer M365 versions.
Here’s what I’ve tried (maybe it helps someone):
- I reinstalled both the Dropbox and Office apps.
- I disabled Background App Refresh and re-enabled it.
- I ensured Dropbox has full access permissions set in iOS settings.
- I checked for any recent device profile changes or security settings that could be causing token expirations.
None of these fixed the issue long-term, unfortunately.
I’d really encourage everyone to keep submitting feedback through the in-app support and also open a support ticket directly with Microsoft and/or Dropbox. More visibility might get this escalated faster.
If anyone finds a workaround or explanation, please post it here. You're definitely not alone!
Hello there.
What is your current Microsoft subscription? Is it MS365 CoPilot? or did you get in in time to choose the MS365 Classic? (Can't help myself, I'm an analyst at heart and love trying to solve problems.)
Re-download Microsoft 365 Productivity Apps then Delete the Microsoft Copilot app. The Dropbox link then works fine. (The iPad has automatically downloaded Copilot even though I cancelled Microsoft 365 and was offered the Classic version at cheaper cost on my laptop.)
I don't have the standalone "Microsoft Copilot" app on any of my devices.
I do have the "Microsoft 365 Copilot" app installed, but that's just the confusingly renamed Microsoft 365 Office app. Is that the one you are referring to?
Yes. That is the app causing all the problems. When you have that installed, Dropbox goes through it and gets all muddled up. When you delete it, Dropbox goes directly to to the 4-year-old old version of Word and keeps the links.
Same issue for me, just started a few months ago.
I'm facing a similar issue, but on Windows, in a company of 250+ users. A few months ago, we started seeing our Storage Account for our cloud file server (Egnyte) disappearing from Office apps (word, excel, powerpoint) almost daily for many of our users.
Something changed within the last 4 - 6 months and I can find very little information about why or how it might be happening!It appears I've solved this by adding Dropbox to the Storage settings under my profile in each MS 365 app. Doing that has allowed the Dropbox connection to become persistent again; no more need to add it each time I go into a MS 365 app.
(I should probably add that I did what follows on my iPhone. The interface and, potentially, process may be different on an iPad.)
To do that, open each app, click your profile -- likely your initials -- in the upper screen, then Settings, then Storage Accounts, then Add Storage Account ... then (re)connect Dropbox.
I have no idea why the persistent connection went away to begin with. But doing the above allowed it to remain on all platforms for me. And sometimes, all's well that (just) ends. 😉
Thanks for the idea but this didn't work. I thought you were on to something at first, thought maybe having M365 on both my iPad and iPhone could be causing it. So I went to my iPhone, deleted Excel and Powerpoint which I never use, then reconnected Dropbox to M365 and Word on both devices. I actually managed to stay persistently connected for about 5 days and thought this great!
But it was not to be. On the 6th day the problem came right back and I was disconnected. Now I'm back to being forced to manually reconnect every 24 hours.
Where the hell is Microsoft in this???? They don't even have the courtesy to acknowledgment this is a problem. SMDH
thanks for the idea, but this didn’t help in my case. The account was already listed as part of my profile and it still disappears every day.
Same thing is happening to me on iPhone, and I'm pretty sure it started immediately after I bought an office 365 base plan just to get more storage on my old hotmail account. I now have to go back and add Dropbox as a file location on my iphone every single time I need to access a file there.
I'm having the same experience and, like you, it worked great for years until a few months ago.
Now I have to manually reconnect Dropbox every time I go into any MS 365 app -- most notably Word and Excel -- every time I try to open a Dropbox controlled file.
And this is true across all of my mobile devices (iPad and iPhone), and whether I try to open these docs directly from the MS 365 app or via a Dropbox handoff to them -- all things that used to work persistently and flawlessly for years.
