Office 365 Outlook 2016 Password Pop up Box

Copper Contributor

We are experiencing a strange issue lately. Users that have multiple O365 accounts connected to their Outlook client, they keep getting random pop ups asking for a password for 1 or 2 or all of the additional accounts. This happens randomly throughout the day. When you enter the password for the account, you get a message that states "Sorry, another account from your organization is already signed in on this computer." You then have to X out of that box. Minutes and sometimes hours can go by and it will come back. Sometimes its for the same account and sometimes its for a different account. We are using a hosted exchange environment and we are running MS Office 2016 Professional Plus. I am unsure of the specific version at this point. The hard part is that it is random and you can't force it to happen and it doesn't affect everyone. I have included a screenshot of the pop up box that appears. login box 1.png

11 Replies

Which Office build is that? I've seen similar behavior with older versions, but that was mostly restricted to the "Account/Connected Services" function. Perhaps it's a variation of this issue or a regression that made it back to the code. In any case, open a support ticket to get this properly investigated.

Thanks Vasil for the reply. Our Office build is 16.0.4639.1000 32-bit. We have tested the "Account/Connected Services" stuff and ruled that out. We have a support ticket open with Microsoft and they have remoted into a couple machines that are experiencing this issue and they still don't know what the cause is and how to fix it. The last thing MS told us to try was flushdns. So, I'm trying to see if there are others out there that have other ideas since MS is out of ideas. Thanks again.

If I understand well, you are running Office 2016 Professional Plus (not ProPlus), i.e. a very old MSI version (not C2R), whose features have not been updated for years...

@Vasil Michev, could this be the problem?

Yes, Salvatore, you are correct. It is Office 2016 Professional Plus. It is an MSI distributed installation that is part of our Universities imaging process.

The strange thing about these pop ups is that they seem to be tied to Skype for Business somehow. I have one of the pop ups on my screen right now. It didn't appear until I clicked on the Skype for Business icon in my toolbar to start a chat with a colleague.

Well, not so strange: in fact, SfB accesses EOL too.

So the culprit could be very well SfB.

Have you perhaps activated MFA?

We have activated MFA for about 15 people at our University. 12 of those are IT staff. There is a desired to turn on MFA for all of IT. What we are noticing though is that these pop ups are happening for some individuals that don't have MFA turned on for their account. I certainly thought about the MFA association though because these pop ups didn't start happening until around the time MFA was turned on.

I was asking it because I have seen similar problems coming out after enabling MFA.

But usually, they disappear after a while.

That looks like a very old version indeed, so I'd certainly recommend updating to a newer one, if possible. A lot of issues with Modern authentication and MFA have been fixed since, yours might well be one of them.

What version should we be using? I asked our O365 admins to download the latest version we have available to us and it is the same as I posted earlier. We are using the 32-bit version. I uninstalled and re-installed today and it went right back to the build version stated earlier. I also now cannot load Skype for Business at all. Just shows the splash screen for a second and then disappears. Nothing in the event viewer. Just doesn't work. Now I have to used Teams to get chats from Skype users. Microsoft still has no answers.

Office 2016 Professional Plus (i.e. the MSI version) is never updated with new features, so it is not a good match for Office 365 services, which are instead continuously updated.

The best match for Office 365 is Office 2016 ProPlus (i.e. the C2R version) which is included with some Office 365 subscriptions and is continuously updated too through several Channels (see https://support.office.com/en-us/article/version-and-build-numbers-of-update-channel-releases-ae9424...).

If you are really serious about Office 365, you should go with Office 2016 ProPlus...