Can't Authenticate to Office 365 Over VPN through office apps ONLY on Windows 7

Steel Contributor

We have received many troubleshooting calls lately from windows 7 users whom cant use their office apps over VPN. Outlook is the main call driver, but I have tested thoroughly and see it happening on all office apps. The problem is the authentication popup. Error says ""We are unable to connect right now. Please check your network and try again later." I escalated this to our network techs and for troubleshooting purposes they have placed an allow any/any rule on the firewall for now. We still have the same error, again only on windows 7 machines, not on windows 10. Any suggestions?

4 Replies
I wanted to add, if we authenticate before connecting the VPN, outlook works fine, connected to outlook.office365.com.

FWIW, I'm having this same problem at the moment on Windows 10, connecting via ExpressVPN. Once Outlook connects (the VPN has to be off for that), switching the VPN on doesn't seem to be a problem, e.g. new mail comes and goes fine.

 

@Robert Woods, I don't see any replies to you - were you able to resolve this back in the day?

 

thanks

@pierredv did anyone get solution for this issue, its happening still with Pulse Secure VPN

@ckollipa, the solution for me, way back, was to switch from the Automatic protocol setting in the ExpressVPN/Options/Protocol tab to L2TP/IPSec (ughh).

 

However, I haven't had to do that for quite a while now; auth for me is working over Automatic again. My hunch is that there was a protocol implementation issue that the ExpressVPN team fixed.

 

If Pulse Secure allows you to choose protocols, you might try playing around with that.

 

Good luck