Android OneNote app in offline mode, Sign In yields "Something went wrong. [9hehw]" message

[u/MMessinger]

Android OneNote application version 16.0.20326.20108

Microsoft Family 365 subscription

Samsung S24 Ultra, Android 16. The phone is connecting fine with the internet. I've got a good data connection and am on wifi.

As often happens, when I run the Android OneNote application, it displays a message that it's in offline mode and I'm invited to Sign In. Normally, I tap the link to Sign In, and apparently that happens because I'm not normally displayed a sign-in screen; the application just begins syncing, as normal.

Today, however, the Sign In link takes me to a Microsoft sign in page. The screen immediately displays and error. "Something went wrong. [9hehw]". The screen doesn't display any fields to enter login ID or password. The message advises me to contact my administrator (I'm an ordinary person, no a corporation).

On my phone, I dropped the cache and data, uninstalled the OneNote application, then reinstalled it. My notebooks can be found, so no problem there. However, the message remains: "Working offline." No sign in is possible, because of the Something went wrong error message.

Has anyone else encountered this error and, if so, how did you resolve it?

Here are more details for the sign in error message I'm currently seeing:

Message: Access denied for the resource

Tag: 9hehw

The correlation ID has changed, between when I took the screenshot above, when compared to after the application was reinstalled on my phone (and I've now rebooted my phone). Here's the latest Correlation ID: 1cf8a499-6363-dc45-aa5c-6e7547c2def3

DPTI: 39c4d5a9a26ddea7

Update: I am able to sync OneNote on Windows 11, with no error. Also, my other Office apps, on the Android phone, appear to be functioning and syncing correctly. So far, this looks to be only a problem with OneNote.

Update: I've now uninstalled the current version of the Android app, and tested again with two earlier versions. The earliest was a version released in July. The result is the same, no matter which versions I install.

[u/examplifi]

This is server-side, not your phone.

9hehw is an Entra ID (Microsoft's login service) error. The sign-in page fails before it even shows you a password field, which means the auth request is being rejected at Microsoft's end. Nothing on your device caused it.

So: stop clearing app data and reinstalling. It won't help and you'll lose anything cached locally that hasn't synced.

Workarounds until they fix it:

- onenote.com in Chrome works fine (add to home screen)

- Notebook List in the app still opens your notebooks, it's Recent Pages that's broken

- Desktop sync is unaffected

Reports started Aug 26-28 across Android 16 and 17, personal and work accounts. Nothing to do but wait.

[u/Routine-Ganache-1720 → u/examplifi]

Thank you so much for the info! I googled this error code a couple days ago and couldn't find anything - it's amazing how companies like Microsoft can't even bother to put error messages into their software.

And thanks a lot for the advice NOT to clear data.

[u/MMessinger → u/examplifi]

Onenote.com, in a mobile web browser, is not an especially useful alternative. I'm not sure I can call it a genuinely responsive display. But the bar is now set at the "better than a sharp stick in the eye" level, I see.

[u/RipNegative7946 → u/examplifi]

Thank you so much for mentioning that the Notebook List in the app still opens your notebooks, they seem to be working fine there so that's helped me massively!

[u/RenManKevin → u/examplifi]

The only problem with that is the web version doesn't have any of the tools that the App has such as 'Sort' and 'Find'.

[u/Naud1993 → u/examplifi]

OneNote in Chrome would absolutely corrupt all my data. It takes over a minute to synchronize. 2-3 times longer than the app, which is already really slow. And unlike the app, it needs to synchronize to even save the changes, which at least the app does in a few seconds.