Two problems that look different but usually share a cause: your account keeps locking, or Outlook and Teams keep asking you to sign in over and over. Nine times out of ten there is a device somewhere still offering an old password - a phone, a tablet in a drawer, a spare laptop, or a scanner that emails documents to the office. Microsoft counts those failed attempts and locks the account to protect it.

Try this first

1. Wait ten minutes before trying again. A short lockout after several wrong passwords usually clears itself. Hammering the sign-in button extends it.
2. Think about every device that holds your work email. Personal phone, old phone in a drawer, iPad, home computer, car. If you changed your password recently, any of them still using the old one will keep locking you out. Update or remove the account on each.
3. Fix the phone first. On an iPhone or Android, open the Outlook app or the built-in Mail app and either sign in again with the current password or remove the account and add it back. This alone resolves most repeat lockouts.
4. Restart the computer. Genuinely. A full restart, not just closing the lid. Sign-in tokens sometimes get stuck and a restart clears them.
5. Check the clock. Right-click the time in the corner and confirm the date, time and time zone are correct and set automatically. A clock that is wrong by more than a few minutes will break sign-in and produce endless prompts.
6. Check you are using your work account, not a personal Microsoft account. If the sign-in screen shows a personal address or an outlook.com address, click Use another account and enter your work email.
7. Tick the box. When signing in on your own work computer, tick Stay signed in or Don’t ask again for 60 days. Not ticking it is the most common reason for being asked several times a day. Do not tick it on a shared computer.
8. If it is only in the browser, check you are not in a private or incognito window, and that your browser is not set to clear cookies every time it closes. Both cause a fresh sign-in every session by design.

If that didn’t fix it

Log a ticket and tell us: which app is prompting (Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, a browser), the exact wording of the message, whether it happens on one device or all of them, and roughly when it started. If you recently changed your password, say so, and mention any device you have not been able to update.

From our side we can see the sign-in log for your account. It tells us which device is presenting the old password, where from, and at what interval, which usually identifies the culprit in a couple of minutes. That is the fastest route when it is a device nobody remembers - the meeting room display, the accounts scanner, an app that was set up years ago with someone’s login.

The other possibility

Sometimes the failed attempts are not yours at all. Someone somewhere may be trying passwords against your account, and the lockout is doing exactly its job. That is not cause for alarm on its own, and it is not something you did wrong, but it is worth telling us so we can look. If it turns out to be genuine attempts from overseas, we will change your password, check your account for anything that should not be there, and confirm your MFA is registered properly.

Still stuck?

Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.

Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.