Microsoft confirms OneDrive sync issue affecting Windows Phone users

Update: Microsoft has confirmed the issue and is working on a solution. There are no current workarounds.

After installing a recent OneDrive update released during week of April 10, 2017 for Windows phones, you may find that OneNote for Windows 10 has stopped syncing to OneDrive, and shows the following error code 80070005 and messages: “We can’t complete this task. Try again” or “You don’t have permission to edit this file and the sync has stopped. Contact the owner.”

STATUS: INVESTIGATING

This is a known issue that we’re actively investigating at this time. We’ll update the information on this page with a workaround or a fix once we know more. Note that your personal Office documents that you access with your Microsoft account, are not syncing at this time. Work and school documents are syncing correctly and are not impacted by this issue.

(Original article follows below)

Much of today’s computing is done on the cloud, with servers syncing our latest notes and documents and keeping them up to date on our myriadnumber of devices. Microsoft is one of those firms pushing a mobile first cloud first future, and for Windows Phone 8.1 users who bought into that scenario the past weekend hasn’t been good.

Reports are coming in on Microsoft’s Support forums that OneDrive, OneNote, and Office Mobile are unable to sync for some users.

One user complained “I have been updating an excel file daily on my Windows 8 Lumia 735 phone on Verizon network. This has worked well for most of 3 years…However, this time, I can’t save anything to OneDrive from my phone. The problem started about a week ago.”

Another on a separate thread noted that “My Lumia 930 runs Windows 8.1 (and cannot be upgraded to Windows 10 apparently) and I can’t access my One Drive files anymore.”

This issue appears to be limited to Windows Phone 8.1 devices, and not on the Windows 10 Mobile iterations of the affected apps. Irritatingly enough, while updating to Windows 10 Mobile would have been easy enough a week ago, the firm appears to have quietly closed the update window this weekend – or at least paused the update temporarily.

A Microsoft rep has responded to one of the threads today, stating that it is currently under investigation.

While this is most likely a server error as Microsoft wouldn’trender a cornerstone feature of Windows phone useless so unceremoniously – the optics of this glitch coming in a week where Microsoft’s mobile commitmentis suspect for fans aren’t good.