Issues with Non-members Accessing Private Team Site Homepage

[Chris Ficek]

This may be an unusual question and it may be an expected behavior?  We have a "private" team site that is set up and locked down for members of the group.  Now that we want to allow non-members to access certain pages on the same site, including the homepage.  This can be done by breaking the permissions and pages can be accessed directly.  What is puzzling is that if the non-members go to the site  https://contoso.sharepoint.com/teams/mysite, they get "access denied" but if they access the default page directly (https://contoso.sharepoint.com/teams/mysite/sitepages/home.aspx), the page loads without an issue.  Can anyone confirm if this is an expected behavior or if we are missing something?  Any assistance would greatly be appreciated.

[#2]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Create a Private Team Site

2. Go to Site Pages library

3. Select and share home.aspx (default homepage) with a non-member

4. Test with non-member's account:

    4.1.  Go to newly created private site (ie: https://contoso.sharepoint.com/teams/mysite)

    4.2   Go to newly created private site default homepage directly (ie:  https://contoso.sharepint.com/teams/mysite/sitepages/home.aspx)

Users will get access denied if trying to access the site directly versus the default page directly.