Solving Timer Service halting daily

Chitra Dharaiya

December 16, 2014

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Overview

The SharePoint Timer Service is key to keeping SharePoint humming.  It runs all the timer jobs, and is therefore responsible for a near endless set of tasks.  I recently found that the timer service was halting shortly after 6am daily.  the service appears as halted.  Some additional symptoms:

• Trying to set the password in Central Administration, Security, Managed Accounts doesn’t fix the issue
• Trying to set the managed account password via PowerShell doesn’t help
• The following appears in the event log:

•  Trying to start the service fails:

Solution

First, check GPEdit.msc to make sure the Computer security policy allows the user to run as a service.  The real catch is that the Domain policy overrides the local policy, so unless the Tenant account has domain rights to log on as a service, it will fail the next morning as the GP settings propagate.