Is it you, or is it me? When Cloud Services aren’t always on. “Failed to load external resource” while authenticating to Azure

The weekend just gone (24-25 March 2018) I was nearing the end of a personal project I’d been building around Internet of Things devices integrating with Azure. There were a few ends that needed a little tidying up and I’d planned to knock those off on Saturday morning. I opened my laptop and in browser hit portal.azure.com and got redirected for authentication at which point I had a blank webpage as shown below.

Figured it was a little weird, but jumped to PowerShell thinking I’d quickly use that to do what I needed.

Huh? That’s not good. I had Teams open so check to see if that was working. Switched Identity for a different Team and ..

Mmmm, same error as PowerShell. What the hell was going on. I still had sessions that I was successfully using on Friday open and functioning.

Going through my thought process I thought it would be best to check the Service Status on Azure. That showed all green. Maybe if I pinged Azure Support? So I did via Twitter.

They were prompt in replying. After more investigation on my end I was thinking the problem was on my end.

So I started troubleshooting, removing cookies, restarting my browser, trying a different browser, changing the default browser and forcing a logout on all Azure accounts via https://login.microsoftonline.com/logout.srf  all to no success. Same error messages (or in the case of the web pages nothing).

What happens if I try to access the URL where the script is located that the authentication pages are trying to load? The output is below. That doesn’t look good. I was out of time by now with other more pressing appointments, so I went to the pub with friends.

Fast forward to Sunday morning and I wanted to finish off my latest extra-curricular project.

Getting back to my laptop the page above was still the primary window, as I hadn’t restarted or anything. I’d just locked my laptop when I left on Saturday. What would happen if I reloaded that page? Woah, that looks better. Page loads. Bad query which is expected.

Switch back to PowerShell and run Login-AzureRmAccount and what do you know it worked. Switch over to Teams and again switched my Identity (for another Team) and it worked. Hit portal.azure.com in my browser and what do you know, it worked too.

My Conclusion – Go to the pub and come back tomorrow

My laptop hadn’t had any relevant changes other than me deleting a few cookies. After which the issue was still present.

I left my laptop to its own devices for 20 hours and then all of a sudden everything is working. If this happens again and I can’t access https://secure.aadcdn.microsoft-online-p.com and I’m getting the “Failed to load external resource” when authenticating to Azure I’ll just go to the pub, and come back the next day and all should be good. And it isn’t me, it was you 🙂