Fixing the “Bad Request – Request Too Long” Error with Office 365 in Chrome

This one really bugs me when it happens, and it’s pretty frequent. If you try to navigate to your Office 365 Settings or the Admin Portal in Office 365 with Chrome, you may well get this error instead of arriving at your regularly scheduled destination. I believe you may have a similar experience in Firefox as well.

I’ve gone Bingling for clues more than once on this one and I find lots of complaints about it happening, but the only solution seems to be “delete your cookies”. This is not an acceptable answer by any stretch of my imagination, but apparently it actually does work.

Eagle-eyed Twitter follower Harold Gale (@1wisegeek – aptly named!) spotted my compaint about it today and came to the rescue with a post with a very targeted fix.

Most common work around: https://t.co/HwP7LewOpi

— Harold Gale (@1wisegeek) January 4, 2017

In the hopes that it will help a few more people (and maybe rise a little higher on the Bingling charts so that they can find it!), here are the steps to the solution, temporary as it may be.

• Go to the the Chrome Settings – usually this will be under the three vertical dots (sideways elipsis? leaky |?) in the top right of your window.

• At the bottom of the page, click “Show advanced settings…”
• Under Privacy, click the “Content Settings” button
• Click on the “All cookies and site data…” button

• In the search box in the upper right, search for “login.microsoft”

I found all these cookies after that search. Note the *5* “testcookie” entries. Enterprise-class!

You can also search for “office365” and/or “office.com” and delete some of those cookies as well.

Note that I have no idea what each of those cookies does, and you will want to be thoughtful about what you delete!

My hope is that this post gets few reads because Microsoft solves the issues here, but the Office 365 login “experience” has been less than stellar for many years now. I’m not going to hold my breath, and at least I know I have this post to help future me out more easily.