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Office365 connectivity issues after 5pm and on weekends

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BrettL
Freshman

Office365 connectivity issues after 5pm and on weekends

My wife and I have been using Hughesnet to work from home since August. We both have similar computers and are using Microsoft Outlook. We had not had any problems (except limits to monthly bandwidth) until about 3 weeks ago. All of a sudden, one day, both of us were unable to send and receive emails after 5pm on weekdays. Typically, the issue was resolved when we started working again the next morning at 9am.

 

When the issue is occurring, Outlook will lock up or say "Trying to Connect" and emails (even small ones) will sit in the outbox until the next day (sometimes, they randomly get out if we leave Outlook open all evening.

 

I have confirmed with HughesNet that they don't believe it is an issue with general connectivity. I can still ping outlook.office365.com and get normal 600ms response. And, I can use other apps including going into my company's VPN and using a separate Outlook on a virtual machine.

 

I found one other HughesNet user who had the same issue and it doesn't look like they have been able to get resolution either. If we cannot find an answer to this, I will have to move on to another company. It is bad enough that I cannot use more than 20GB a month (my nieces and nephews eat up the entire allottment if I don't steal their iPads from them when they come over for an afternoon) but this is completely untenable. I have to work at night.

 

I would appreciate some help to figure out what configuration or setting is causing this issue.

 

Thank you.

Brett

31 REPLIES 31
ProstarDad
New Poster

This is clearly going on and it seems related to the https (ssl) side of things ..... 

Liz
Moderator
Moderator

Good morning Brett,

 

Thank you for the details, this helps. Can you please try removing and re-adding the e-mail account in question (just on one of the computers for troubleshooting purposes). Let me know if that makes a difference. Also, if one of your devices is a laptop, can you confirm if this issue persists on a non-HughesNet connection?  

 

  Your cooperation, patience, and understanding are much appreciated.

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Liz, I will ask my tech support team to remove and re-add the email accont as I am not sure what that means. They have already tried removing MS Office and reinstalling and that didn't change the result. This is literally an issue that occurs like clockwork in the evening and is fine again at 9am the next day. It also occurs over the weekend. If I drive 5 miles, I can use my phone's wifi hotspot to connect my laptop and then send the emails (as a I mentioned, some of these emails being tiny ones with no attachments). I am looking into moving to a different provider as this is no longer tenable. When I need to send something to colleagues at night, I move to other tools like Slack and gmail which work fine.

Good morning Brett, 


Thank you for the additional information. That is very interesting. So starting three weeks ago, only your Office365 started having connectivity issues between 5pm-9am and on weekends. However your other services like Slack and Gmail work fine. Sounds like Office365 isn't playing well with the HughesNet service. While you're at it, I'd check with your IT folks if they are aware of any updates or changes to Office365 (if that's something they deployed for all employees) that was done about three weeks ago. They might have information that might shed light on what's happening.

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@Liz 

There has been a general steady degredation of all Microsoft-reated links for a while now. As an example, I updated Skype this morning during the bonus period, and it was constantly stalling out.


* Disclaimer: I am a HughesNet customer and not a HughesNet employee. All of my comments are my own and do not necessarily represent HughesNet in any way.
maratsade
Distinguished Professor IV

I have issues with Outlook  Web App that get worse as the day wears on, and in the evening, it won't connect. Ditto Google Drive.   

Hi Mark and maratsade,

 

Thank you for your input, that is intriguing. I'm looking into this and will inquire with our engineers about it.

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maratsade
Distinguished Professor IV

A couple more bits of info: if I use a different provider, the problem goes away. And running tracerts when the problem occurs shows stalled hops along the pathway. 

Good morning Keith, 

 

Thanks for speaking up! I'll send over your info to our engineers as well. 

 

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Greetings,

 

There is an entire thread I started several weeks ago regarding this exact issue!!!

 

https://community.hughesnet.com/t5/Tech-Support/Cannot-receive-mail-via-Outlook-Office-365-or-connec...

 

It is very real, and it's very frustrating!!  Both MS Outlook and OneDrive are dead-in-the-water in the evenings and on weekends; and lately dropbox has started acting up.  Removing and reinstalling exchange accounts does not solve the problem!!  Unfortunately, MS websites through xxxxx.live.com (e.g. onedrive.live.com; outlook.live.com, etc.) are also affected so you can't even connect through the web.

 

Basically something is blocking specific websites and apps (perhaps those with certain encryption protocols?) from appox. 5pm to 11pm each evening and from 10AM to late into the evening on weekends. However, download/upload speeds are not affected.  Interestingly, MS Mail that comes with Windows10 does not seem to be affected (perhaps it uses a different encryption protocol?) and continues to work with my home email.

 

We have several PCs & Laptops and all of them are affected.  However, if I disconnect my cellphone from wifi I can connect to my outlook email through my phone (thanks to a Weboost cell-signal amplifier/repeater).  I can also use my cellphone as a wifi hotspot and use this connection to connect with Outlook through my laptop.

 

One other solution to get to your work email would be to go through your workplace office 365 portal - most companies that use MS exchange will have one.  This step will bypass outlook.live.com over your connection and, instead, use your work's "outlook.office.com/owa/..." connection.

 

Hopefully, someone will figure out what's going on at some point.

 

Steve

Good morning all,

 

One of our lead engineers is already investigating this, and once I have any news to share, I will update this thread. I appreciate your patience and cooperation!

 

 

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Good morning folks,

 

We appreciate your patience while engineering investigates. BrettL, MarkJFine, and maratsade please let me know if you're seeing anything different. Engineering is still doing more testing today, but we want to know your current experience.

 

  Your cooperation, patience, and understanding are much appreciated.

 

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Unsure of the timing of things.

Tuesday evening was awful - Excel locking up, constantly trying to sign in to OneDrive and timing out.

In comparison, yesterday (Wednesday evening) seemed fine.


* Disclaimer: I am a HughesNet customer and not a HughesNet employee. All of my comments are my own and do not necessarily represent HughesNet in any way.
maratsade
Distinguished Professor IV

This morning OWA, Google Drive, and iMessage all worked.  I'm going to do more testing over the weekend to see what happens during times of high congestion.  Thanks for working on this! 

Thanks for your feedback so far!

 

maratsade, do you have a timeframe for when you tested this earlier today?

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First things first: thank you all for taking this problem seriously and working on a solution!!

If it helps the effort, our office apps (outlook and onedrive) have stayed connected this AM through what has typically been the 7:30-8:30AM MST weekday "witching hour" for the first time in several weeks.

 

 

Good morning steveandkris,

 

Thank you for your feedback as well, that's good to hear! I've passed this along to our engineers in case it helps shed light on anything. I'll keep this thread updated with any news I can share.

 

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maratsade
Distinguished Professor IV

Yes, between 7 am and 9 am. 

 


@Liz wrote:

Thanks for your feedback so far!

 

maratsade, do you have a timeframe for when you tested this earlier today?


 

No problems either last night or this morning. Looks like someone Spock'd the warp engines.


* Disclaimer: I am a HughesNet customer and not a HughesNet employee. All of my comments are my own and do not necessarily represent HughesNet in any way.

Unfortunately we continued to have Outlook connection issues last evening.  However, the problem didn't start until after 7pm which was a couple of hours later than "normal" :-).

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