Logon failure with Azure AD DS based services

Fix a madding “Invalid password” error when trying to use an Azure service that uses Azure AD DS as it’s authentication

I hope this helps someone fix a madding “Invalid password” error when trying to use an Azure service that uses Azure AD DS as it’s authentication with a synced account from on-premise AD.

With a recent implementation of Windows Virtual Desktop, and interesting failure occurred with a set of users that were synchronized to Azure AD from an on-premise AD environment.

The environment was one where there was no longer an Azure AD Connect configuration in place, in fact, the on-premise AD environment was no longer available. All users were using Office 365 services without any issues, and Azure AD Domain Services was implemented for new Azure services, one of them being WVD.

All WVD services were tested with the admin account that created the resources, and some test users created in Azure AD, however, when the group that needed to use the service tried to use it with their accounts, around half the necessary users could not log into the VM image.

After verifying all permissions were correctly assigned, and checking to see if there were any relevant differences between the accounts that were able to log on vs. the ones that were not, I noticed that all accounts were able to log on to the web URL, however after the initial logon to the service, the originally synced accounts were failing with an “invalid password” error, whereas the ones that were directly created in Azure succeeded. – Aha! This pointed me to the fact that the accounts seemed to be having some sort of Azure ADDS failure, as 365 services were not dependent on that.

Quite a few articles were read all over the place, with none being any help, so I went back to the basics, and went over the Azure AD to Azure AD DS synchronization guide much more methodical than I previously had.

I’ll cut to the chase, in the middle of that guide, the following statement is made: When a user is created in Azure AD, they’re not synchronized to Azure AD DS until they change their password in Azure AD.