Blank page (auth.owa Http 500) when logging into Outlook Web Access running on Exchange 2010

OK.. after a few updates have noticed that the OWA was not working . ย Nothing new there.. ย  ย No one ย could access their e-mails via the web.

ย  Checking the IIS logs, I found that the error was 500 which indicated some kind of authentication error.

A little power-shell cmdlet you can run is Test-OWAConnectivity. So I ran the cmdlet and recievedย WARNING: An unknown failure occurred during logon. So I checked IIS and ensured that all of the authentication was set correctly and indeed it was.ย  So after some poking around on the web I found out Exchange 2010 palms off the Forms Based Authentication to a separate Service calledย  Microsoft ExchangeForms-Based Authentication Service. Starting this service fixed the blank page issue and allowed clients to authenticate correctly.

So simple cure to a blank problem.. make sure thatย  Microsoft ExchangeForms-Based Authentication Service is running…