Some Chrome users experienced issues when opening Microsoft sites in the web browser as they were greeted by a “this site can’t be reached” error instead of the real website.
This happened on different Microsoft properties but not all of them. I experienced it when I tried to open the Microsoft Web Store for instance, but also elsewhere if sign in was required to access the content.
The error message reads in full:
This site can’t be reached
www.microsoft.com unexpectedly closed the connectin
Try
Checking the connectin
Checking the proxy and the firewall
Running Windows Network Diagnostics
The issue was not on my top list of issues that I wanted to investigate as I’m not using Chrome as my main browser.
It appears however that many users are affected by the issue. Paul Thurott mentioned the issue on Twitter, and a solution was found eventually that seems to resolve the issue for most users.
Apparently, it is a cookie issue that is prevent Chrome from connecting to select Microsoft’s sites and web pages.
While you could go ahead and clear all cookies, something that you do by using the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-Del, making sure “Cookies and other site and plugin data” and “the beginning of time” under Obliterate the following items are selected, it is overkill as you will delete all cookies not just the ones set on Microsoft sites.
You may want to do the following instead:
Step 1: Go to the Microsoft website, or a page the error is thrown on.
Step 2: Click on the little icon in front of the Microsoft web address.
Chrome displays the number of cookies set by the site.
Step 3: Click on the link underneath Cookies that displays the number of cookies from that site. This opens an overlay on the page listing all allowed and blocked cookies.
Step 4: Select all sites one after the other, and hit the remove button each time. This removes all cookies set by that particular domain. The list of allowed cookies should be empty in the end.
Step 5: Close the overlay, and reload the page if it threw an error on connect previously. If things went well, the page should load now.
Now You: Did you experience the issue in Chrome?