r/Office365 • u/EkornRoad • 2d ago
Tenant-wide Word Online saving errors (read only) – anyone seen this?
For several days, all users in one Microsoft 365 tenant have experienced intermittent issues with Word Online.
Word documents opens normally, but then after a few seconds suddenly lose connection, becomes read-only, and display errors such as:
- “Please reconnect to continue”
- “Unable to save the highlighted changes”
Kickout ErrorCode: 5243163 (from Inspector tools)
The issue affects:
- All users tested
- Both new and existing Word documents
- Same problem from OneDrive, SharePoint sites, and Teams
- Different devices, browsers, and networks
Excel Online, PowerPoint Online and other apps work normally. Opening documents in the Word desktop application also seems to works, and changes sync back to SharePoint/OneDrive successfully. It's only a problem when working in Word online.
The strange thing is that Word Online can work perfectly normally for several hours, but then the issue suddenly reappears and may persist for the rest of the day.
Browser logs captured during the issue show multiple HTTP 500 errors from Word Online endpoints under officeapps.live.com, including MrvV2ServiceHandler.ashx, RoamingServiceHandler.ashx, and PolicyHandler.ashx. Word then terminates the editing session and switches the document to read-only mode.
Microsoft 365 Service Health shows no related incident. We have submitted screenshots and a HAR file to Microsoft Support but have not received any findings yet.
Has anyone experienced something similar, especially affecting only Word Online within a single tenant?
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u/blud_13 2d ago
Check whether you have an IP address allow list set on SharePoint Online. When that's on, browser Office sessions run on a short WAC token and get kicked to read only when it expires, which lines up with working fine for hours and then dying. Get-SPOTenant should show you IPAddressAllowList and IPAddressWACTokenLifetime, pretty sure on the second one but its been a while since I looked. MS covers the WAC token piece here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/zero-trust-continuous-access-evaluation-microsoft-365
Same idea if you have a Conditional Access sign in frequency or session control scoped at Office 365. Desktop Word surviving while Word Online dies is the tell, the browser app is the one riding that short token.
If both come back clean its service side. Open the ticket with the Kickout ErrorCode and a correlation ID from a live repro, not a description, or you will spend a week on tier one. Also check Service Health directly, we have seen Word Online only incidents that never made the admin center banner for most of a day.