Support our independent tech coverage. Chrome Unboxed is written by real people, for real people—not search algorithms. Join Chrome Unboxed Plus for just $2 a month to get an ad-free experience, access to our private Discord, and more. Learn more about membership here.
START FREE TRIAL (MONTHLY)START FREE TRIAL (ANNUAL)
UPDATE: We just received word that Google’s engineers have identified the issue and are rolling out a fix as we speak. You can find the official announcement here.
A couple of years ago, there was an issue in ChromeOS 84 that prevented users from logging into their devices. Upon entering their Google account password, they would be presented with an error stating that the credentials were incorrect. What does that have to do with December 13, 2022? Very little aside from the fact that my post about that issue has been getting a lot of traffic over the past couple of hours. That’s a bit unusual for an article that was written well over two years ago and even more true when you consider that the problem was fixed within days, if not hours.
The spike in readers on that particular post led me to the conclusion that there were users actively seeking information about Chromebook sign-in issues. It didn’t take long to find a few posts on Google’s official Chromebook support forum from users that were having the issue. Upon digging a little deeper, it appears that it is specifically affecting managed devices at a number of educational institutions across the U.S. and it is preventing managed accounts/devices from logging into their accounts. A quick look at Downdetector revealed that the issue is relatively widespread with more than 1,500 reports rolling in over the past couple of hours.
Hi all! The chromebooks in my district seem to be entering an infinite login loop. Whenever someone tries to sign in, the device acts like it is thinking, goes dark, then throws us back to the original login screen.
Chromebook Forum
We’ve reached out to our contact at Google to see if this issue has been identified but it appears to be a Workspace problem rather than a ChromeOS-specific bug. I was able to log into my Chromebook with my company email with no issue but we don’t manage our devices via the Admin Console. It appears that this problem is specifically affecting Workspace accounts on managed devices and it is preventing login entirely but some admins may have found a workaround.
This may not be a blanket fix but it seems to be working for a number of users. If your school or institution is having trouble logging into your ChromeOS devices, you can try connecting the Chromebooks to a mobile hotspot on your phone. For some, this seems to do the trick and allow users to log into their devices. Once logged in, users reported that they could then jump back on the school internet and everything worked as intended.
We still aren’t sure what the root cause is here but I’d wager that it is some sort of DNS issue. Our friends at Google said that they may have some information for us and I’ll update this post accordingly when we get word. Until then, it’s worth giving the hotspot route a try if you absolutely must get logged into your devices. Every phone is a little different but you can find some basics on using your Android phone as a wi-fi hotspot here.
