Azure Storage Explorer stuck on “Waiting for authentication”

Updated 18 August 2026

You press Sign in, Storage Explorer says Waiting for authentication…, and nothing else happens. No browser window, no error — it just sits there. This has been open in Microsoft's own issue tracker for years, so if it feels like the app rather than your account, that reading is fair.

The usual cause: the browser never opens

Storage Explorer signs you in by launching your default browser. If it cannot launch it — an unusual default browser, a browser that opens into a locked profile, or a browser still starting up — the app waits forever for a callback that never comes.

1. Set your default browser to Edge or Chrome.
2. Open that browser first, and sign in to the Azure portal there.
3. Go back to Storage Explorer and sign in again.

If that did not do it

• Clear the cache. Help → Clear Cache, then restart the app. A stale token cache produces exactly this hang.
• Check your proxy. Storage Explorer supports basic proxy authentication only. On an NTLM proxy the sign-in cannot complete, and the symptom is this same silent wait.
• Roll back one version. Several releases have shipped with sign-in regressions. If it broke right after an update, the previous installer is the fastest way back.

The way around it entirely

The hang lives in the interactive sign-in flow. If you attach a storage account with an access key or a SAS token instead, there is no browser step at all:

1. Azure portal → your storage account → Security + networking → Access keys.
2. Copy the connection string or the key.
3. Storage Explorer → Connect (the plug icon) → Storage account or service → paste it.

This is also why key-based tools do not suffer this class of failure: there is no redirect, no callback, and nothing to wait on. The trade-off is real — account keys grant full access to that account, so treat them like passwords, and some organizations disable them on purpose.

When you are only reading blobs

If what you actually need is to look at a container and read a file, a full desktop app is a lot of moving parts to keep working. Reading blobs over the REST API with a key is a much smaller surface — that is the approach our IDE plugin takes, listed below.