Solution for Outlook App – “You cannot access this right now”

This took me a few minutes to figure out, but being the sharer that I am, thought I’d help some others. It took a few minutes for this to ‘click in’ for me, so let’s see if I can help others have it ‘click in’, faster. 🙂

What

I opened Outlook on my iPad and couldn’t connect to my Office 365 Exchange email account. I got the following message.

I spent several minutes scratching my head, assuming there was some sort of outage, etc.

So What

Silly me. Two things at play here:

• We enabled conditional access for our Azure setup because it is better security (limited to Canadian connections only) and because … well, with Covid-19 right now, limiting access to Canada right now made sense as none of us are travelling
• I signed up for MLB.TV and shhhhh, setup a VPN (using Dashlane) on my iPad so I could pick up the Blue Jays game – without the VPN I was ‘blocked out’ regionally

Now What

Well, dummy that I am, I didn’t connect the dots right away (the rum and cokes while watching the ball game didn’t help ;).

However, I’m happy we have extra strict security and after a few moments of reflection, I realized the error in my ways (but after uninstalling Outlook thinking perhaps reinstalling the app would help, LOL).

Anyways, hope this helps someone, some day.