This post was most recently updated on February 25th, 2022.

2 min read.

This article explains a quick solution to a pretty common Azure DevOps problem. Namely – random and annoying 404 (or sometimes 401) errors when trying to access your dear team projects.

I forgot to take screenshots of the errors and couldn’t figure out how to reproduce them, but hey, the fix is the main point, right? 😀 If you’ve ended up on this page, you’ve probably encountered the issue already, so why would you care about the screenshots anyway.

Solution

Ok, so this is a pretty easy one. Below, you’ve got 2 options: either a super-simple 1-step solution or a standard-simple 5-step solution.

Time needed: 5 minutes

How to (usually) fix 404 or 401 errors in Azure DevOps

(Optional shortcut) Just forget about the rest of the steps and use a different browser
Yeah. That’ll do the trick.

It won’t fix your primary default browser, though – so if you want to have that back, follow the rest of the steps!
Navigate to the Project home
You probably have that in your browser “bookmarks” or “recents” or something. You should just open up the page and get that sweet, sweet 404 error. Don’t fret, though – we’ll fix it (probably)!
Select the “lock”-icon
This works very similarly in most Chromium-based browsers – but the icon should look somewhat like this:
Select “Cookies”
Clickety-click it open, and you should get a nice dialog showing you the active cookies for the site.
Clear all cookies for “dev.azure.com”
Select the dev.azure.com domain and hit “Remove”.

Don’t worry – you’ll get them back.
Refresh the page
Hit F5 and you should be good!

Did it work? Let me know in the comments -section below!

Author
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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Speaker / Consultant at Koskila / Precio Fishbone / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as Solutions Architect for Precio Fishbone, building delightful Digital Workplaces.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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