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 .  Nothing new there..    No one  could access their e-mails via the web.

  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 recieved 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.  So after some poking around on the web I found out Exchange 2010 palms off the Forms Based Authentication to a separate Service called  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 that  Microsoft ExchangeForms-Based Authentication Service is running…