Sunday debug: password reset failed

I wasn’t planning to debug anything today on Sunday, but here I am, spent half hour debugging why I can’t reset my password. 🙂

The problem

I log in to https://myaccount.microsoft.com/ portal tried to change my Office 365 account password, and surprised got an error:

We’re sorry, but we cannot change your password at this time. This is due to a temporary connectivity issue, so if you try again later, changing your password may succeed

What I have tried to fix this

I was pretty sure I have configured Self-Service Password Reset in my tenant, so I did a double-check. Turns out, it was disabled, clearly, I disabled it a few weeks ago when I was testing something else, can’t remember what it was. So I enabled this service again, simple, right? But still, I can’t reset my password. In On-premises integration, it still said:

Unfortunately, it looks like we can’t connect to your on-premises writeback client right now

So I checked my Azure AD connect configuration again, Password writeback is enabled, ran a full sync, no issues. I also updated Azure AD connect, ran a full sync again. In Azure portal, Azure AD connect health shows healthy, no sync issues. Everything looks good as it should be.

But still not working… So I went through these two Microsoft documentation how to trouble shoot, nothing really useful for this case

One last try

Hm… not giving up yet. So one last try.

• Disable Azure AD connect password write back
• Make full sync using PowerShell: Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Initial
• Enable Azure AD connect password write backMake
• full sync using PowerShell: Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Initial

Here we go, problem solved, disabled and re-enabled helped! On-premises integration shows green light, and I can reset my password again.

(Feature image is credit by Sarah Pflug , and the picture is from here )