Links in Office take at least 60 seconds to open AD FS sites

  • Article
  • Applies to:
    Word for Microsoft 365, Word 2016, Excel for Microsoft 365, Excel 2016, PowerPoint for Microsoft 365, PowerPoint 2016

Symptoms

When you access Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) sites through hyperlinks in Microsoft Office applications, the sites take a minimum of 60 seconds to open.

Cause

This issue occurs because the following conditions are true:

  • AD FS doesn't know how to handle a HEAD request that it receives from an Office application.
  • AD FS tries to respond by returning an error message. However, the AD FS protocol rejects it because the HEAD response can't contain a request body.

Resolution

The following resolution is applicable to only AD FS 4.0 and later versions.

Important

Follow the steps in this section carefully. Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Before you modify it, back up the registry for restoration in case problems occur.

To fix this issue, add the following registry key on affected client computers.

Subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity

DWORD: ReplaceHLinkHEADRequestWithGET

Value: 1 (Hexadecimal for Base)