Outlook 365 (desktop) intermittently fails (server login error 0x800ccc92) for email accounts hosted at .hotmail, and .live domains only.

Dear Ztagevets,

Thanks for using Microsoft products and posting in the community.

I realize that you've encountered a problem  ,and I understand how you feel.

Read your description here carefully.

I would like to ask which account you use, whether it is an ordinary personal account or a business account.

If it is a personal account, it will be based on your usage status. Your account will be identified as abnormal activity by Microsoft, so you will be asked to log in again to verify your identity.

So for you, a personal account cannot meet your requirements. If you have such enterprise level requirements. You may need to contact our corporate department and use a corporate account or service to meet your company's usage needs.

We look forward to your response.

Best Wish

Yung.D| Microsoft Community Support Specialist

You obviously did not "carefully read" my post. With all due respect, you seem to have no idea what you are talking about. Please remove your comment and I will wait for someone that is more qualified to answer. If you leave this comment, it will only confuse others.

Something to check is to make sure Outlook is connected to the @Live and @Hotmail accounts using OAuth. To do this, press the Ctrl key and then right click the Outlook icon in the System Tray and click Connection Status, Description of the Connection Status dialog box - Outlook | Microsoft Learn. On the Connection Status dialog check what it shows for those accounts under the AuthN column. They should show as MSA for OAuth. If they show Clear then that is Basic Auth.

For Outlook.com Basic Auth is degraded and will be deprecated soon, Outlook and other apps are unable to connect to Outlook.com when using Basic authentication - Microsoft Support.

To make sure what version of Outlook you are using click File, Office Account, under About Outlook what Version/Build do you have?

Hi Gabriel,

Microsoft® Outlook® for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2404 Build 16.0.17531.20140) 64-bit

No MSA, so Basic Auth is being used.

Here is a screenshot...

Since basic auth for Outlook.com is degraded and will soon be deprecated my suggestion would be to create a new Outlook Profile and use the auto account setup for those account and let them add as OAuth, Create an Outlook profile - Microsoft Support. The auto account setup will add them as Exchange accounts which by default use OAuth. The other option would be to remove the Outlook.com accounts from the current profile and add them back using auto account configuration (File, Add Account).

If you leave them as they currently, are they will continue to see auth prompts or disconnected. The Outlook Team is not planning to do any optimization to make basic auth work any better.

Ok, I think I understand what needs to be done. Heavy sigh.

To be clear, when you refer to outlook.com, we are also talking about email hosted by @live.com, @hotmail.com, and probably a few other domains that fall under the outlook.com banner.

Hopefully this thread serves others in the community who are still banging their heads against the wall every day with this issue. I know I've spent 10s of hours researching and trying to solve with educated guesswork. I sort of just yielded to the idea of clicking past the 80 error popups a day from Outlook interrupting my work. I really thought the issue would eventually get address by MS as more and more Office Outlook users complained.

Also, since when does "depreciated" mean sporadically working or sporadically not working? To me, the moment basic auth is no longer reliable, it has ceased to function and we can call it "unsupported" today.

Thank you, however, for finally making sense of this for me.

That is correct Outlook.com will include @live.com, @hotmail.com, @msn.com.

Normally the Outlook Team would have fixed any issues but the basic auth problem is an unusual circumstance. This article is the best explanation, Outlook and other apps are unable to connect to Outlook.com when using Basic authentication - Microsoft Support. I apologize for and recognize the frustration with it.

No doubt that abandoning basic auth is the correct path. But the way they did it is frustrating to me and thousands of other customers.

How much effort would be required to add a little more information to the canned error/popup in Outlook? All it says is 0x800ccc92. The are many reasons why 0x800ccc92 errors can happen. A quick search online and it is easy to see how one could spend a ton of time doing things to outlook and your email configuration that are not going to help. I'm sure I myself wasted 24 hours in total.

MS should have added some code to check for hosted outlook email accounts for basic auth and throw a bit more in the error message to point us to the right place.

I'm certain there are a lot of people that are still scratching their heads on this one.

I revised my Outlook yesterday. I created a new Outlook profile as suggested and added my hotmail account using IMAP. Now, even with IMAP, still it works intermittently.

Again, no problems with my other accounts in Outlook, only this @hotmail.com and a @live.com account I have not moved to IMAP yet.

I even moved this @hotmail.com account to its own Send/Receive Group and set it for a 5 minute send/receive instead of 3 minute like my other 15 accounts in Outlook.

Again, most of the time - it works, but a few times per hour, I get a popup and error. This time, the error is 0x800ccc0e.

If I look at the "Connection Status" dialog window, it shows this account is connected via IMAP.

I apologize if I was not clear but the only way to connect with OAuth is to add the Outlook.com accounts as Exchange accounts. To add an account as Exchange, click File, Add Account, in the Email address field put the address for the Outlook.com account and click Connect. This will add the account as Exchange, and it will support the most functionality available such as contact and calendar sync.