Microsoft’s Outlook email app is crashing suddenly for people worldwide

[Karlston]

Microsoft’s Outlook email app is crashing suddenly for people worldwide

Microsoft is investigating the issues

Microsoft’s Outlook email app for Windows is crashing at launch for a large number of users around the world. Office 365 business users are reporting that Outlook launches and then crashes immediately, seemingly after a recent update. “We’re investigating whether a recently deployed update could be the source of this issue,” explains Microsoft in a Twitter status update.

 

In another update shared on Twitter, Microsoft said it’s rolling out a fix for the issue that should reach all customers “over the next few hours.” Affected users should be able to log into Outlook on the web until the issues are resolved. IT admins over on Reddit are also testing a variety of workarounds to roll back the update that appears to have caused the crashes today.

 

Update July 15th, 3:36PM ET: Added tweet from Microsoft about a fix.

 

 

Microsoft’s Outlook email app is crashing suddenly for people worldwide

 

[Karlston]

Bad Office Click-to-Run (and installed MSI version?) update blamed for Outlook freeze

Lots of reports this morning about Outlook freezing on start.

 

From an anonymous poster on AskWoody:

Today when I went to check my email, Outlook would not open; it would load the “Starting Outlook…” splash screen, which would close without opening the Outlook window itself, and the taskbar icon went away. Looking in Reliability History, it states that Outlook has crashed.

 

I tried opening in safe mode (it does the exact same process as described above) and restarting the computer to no avail. I even tried the full repair (not the quick one), redownloading and reactivating MS Office 2019, but no go.

Quintalis on Reddit:

Outlook immediately crashing on open after patching last night

 

Even in safe mode, appcrash. Full online repair no good, rolling back updates, anyone seeing this?

 

edit: appcrash, exception code 0xc0000005, re-install no good, rollback no good. We also regedited for sigred mitigation last night, I’m tempted to temporarily undo that and test…

 

edit2: temporarily unpatched sigred, tested, not the culprit!

 

edit3: Had some copies of Office 2019 C2R lying around, installed version 1808 (Build 10363.20015 Click-to-run) and it’s working. Yay?

From tenebrousrogue:

I’ve got a fix, after this hit several of our clients. Performing a rollback fixed it, must be a bad office update. open cmd, run:

 

cd “\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun”

then:

 

officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.6366.2062

 

EDIT: u/peEtr had success as well, with a more recent version (June24th). Change the second command to:

officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.12827.20470

Additional reports (1, 2, 3)

 

UPDATE: From @rpodric

I assumed the update they were talking about was server side, since I’ve been on the same C2R (Beta) build for a week, but who knows. Nothing should have changed build-wise here. My third attempt running it this morning was successful somehow.

In the past few minutes, Microsoft has acknowledged the bug, but you’re on your own. “As a workaround, users can utilize Outlook on the web or their mobile clients.” Golly. My PC doesn’t work for email, so I need to whip out my iPad?

 

 

Bad Office Click-to-Run (and installed MSI version?) update blamed for Outlook freeze

 

[Karlston]

Microsoft says Outlook on the desktop is down due to some "recent updates" [Update]

 

Microsoft released its Patch Tuesday set of updates to all supported versions of Windows. The update brought with it a few fixes for Windows 10 version 2004’s known issues, such as the random reboot problem caused by the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) failures. Now, users have begun reporting that the latest updates either to the OS or the Office suite of apps are causing Outlook on the desktop to crash.

 

Users began posting about the issue on Microsoft’s Tech Community forums stating that the mail client fails to open and is stuck at the “starting” screen. The Office 365 Service health portal confirms the outage, adding that the “recently deployed updates are the likely source of the problem”. The company adds that it is investigating the issue to pinpoint the exact cause of the problem. The post also confirms that the issue does not affect Outlook.com or the Android version of the app. Business users can look for additional information in the admin center under ‘EX218604’ and 'OL218603', the firm says.

 

Other reports suggest that the tool fails with the exception code ‘0xc0000005’, and the only workaround is to roll back to a previous version of Outlook on Windows 10. Alternatively, users that are heavily impacted due to this issue can also try to uninstall the latest cumulative update by heading into Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update > View update history > Uninstall Updates to check if that helps. You can head here to see the exact KB article that was released yesterday for your version of Windows 10.

 

We will keep an eye on the service health dashboard and will update the article with further updates from the Redmond giant when received.

 

Update: Microsoft has updated the 'Service health' dashboard stating that the company has identified the cause of the issue and is "applying" a fix. However, it adds that the deployment may take up to a few hours until it reaches all affected users. The company has not provided any further specifics of what the fix is and how it is being applied.

 

 

Microsoft says Outlook on the desktop is down due to some "recent updates" [Update]

 

[aum]

Microsoft quickly fixes a nasty bug which killed Outlook app

 

Outlook client for Microsoft 365 was crashing upon launch

 

Microsoft has fixed a nasty issue with the Outlook client for Microsoft 365 (the new name for Office 365), which was causing the app to crash upon launching.

 

This was a serious and widespread problem for many users, going by online reports, and indeed there were complaints on Twitter of entire organizations being affected and hamstrung by the bug in Outlook.

 

As you might expect, Microsoft was quickly on the case, and according to Twitter updates, the software giant completed the rollout of the fix within six hours of first investigating the issue.

Swift fix

So you should have received the relevant update by now, and Outlook should be fixed, although as noted, you may need to restart the client (or indeed try to run it again, if it’s completely failing to launch).

 

At any rate, all should be well now, and at least Microsoft concocted the fixed swiftly (though the company certainly needed to, given the apparent gravity of the problem).

 

Naturally, as well as having to fix it from time to time, Microsoft is constantly trying to improve Microsoft 365 apps, with one of the latest innovations being a new feature that attempts to kill off frustrating ‘reply-all’ email chains.

 

Source

[Karlston]

Outlook went down for four hours Wednesday. What happened?

The version of Outlook that runs on Windows PCs suddenly stopped working worldwide on Wednesday. The outage wasn’t caused by a bad patch. It wasn’t restored by an update. Microsoft isn’t saying much, but there’s a plausible explanation - and it’s disconcerting.

Suwaree Tangbovornpichet / Getty Images

 

At mid-morning Wednesday in the U.S., Outlook stopped working. Dead in its tracks. Both the Click-to-Run version of Office (er, Microsoft) 365 and the installed (MSI) version of Outlook refused to start: 

Today when I went to check my email, Outlook would not open; it would load the “Starting Outlook…” splash screen, which would close without opening the Outlook window itself, and the taskbar icon went away. Looking in Reliability History, it states that Outlook has crashed.

 

I tried opening in safe mode (it does the exact same process as described above) and restarting the computer to no avail. I even tried the full repair (not the quick one), redownloading and reactivating MS Office 2019, but no go.

Then, four or so hours later, Outlook suddenly started working again.

 

There are so many programs running around called “Outlook” that it’s difficult to nail down which versions of Outlook went AWOL. But it looks like all of the recent versions of Microsoft 365 Click-to-Run Current Channel – dating back to June 30’s Version 2006 Build 13001.20266, at least – as well as Office 2019 packed their bags and left the station.

 

Microsoft, in its inimitable way, left a trail in its @MSFT365Status tweets:

We’re investigating an issue affecting user access to Outlook. We're investigating whether a recently deployed update could be the source of this issue. As a workaround, users can utilize Outlook on the web or their mobile clients… (four hours later) We're rolling out a fix for this issue, and we expect the mitigation to reach all customers over the next few hours. 

So for four hours yesterday, you could get at your Outlook email through your iPad, or by hitting the website, but the version of Outlook you probably use on your PC had taken the morning off.

 

Ends up the sudden disappearance was attributable to the Outlook.exe program crashing with an error 0xc0000005. Lawrence Abrams at BleepingComputer has full details.

 

Two obvious questions present themselves:

1. What broke? There weren’t any new versions of Office pushed out yesterday. Yet, all over the world, millions (if not hundreds of millions) of Outlook users all had the rug pulled out from under them.
2. How did Microsoft fix it? There was no patch delivered, no new C2R version, no emergency update for Outlook 2019. Microsoft’s resorted to some odd patch delivery mechanisms lately (notably using the Microsoft Store) and it’s had multiple-cumulative-update problems. But this fix apparently didn’t touch PCs at all.

Microsoft’s proffered explanation doesn’t pass the sniff test:

There is a new symptom of Outlook crashing on launch starting on 7/15/2020.   A fix has been published but will take time to propagate to worldwide availability. Outlook will automatically look for the fix on launch, so if this issue persists through multiple launches please use Outlook Web Access (or your providers webmail interface) for an hour then try again. This problem is not associated with any of the 7/15/2020 security patches so there is no need to uninstall them if Outlook will not launch. 

In fact, there weren’t any changes made to any PCs. Individual users didn’t get new versions. Administrators didn’t push anything out on their networks. Outlook just suddenly started working again.

 

Many people discovered that they could get Outlook working by rolling back a few versions. Older versions of Outlook (both C2R and MSI) worked. The newer ones didn’t. The bug had nothing to do with specific patches.

 

I was contemplating the mysteries of life, the universe and Outlook appcrashes, when an anonymous post appeared on AskWoody:

Woody – can’t tell you my source but basically rumor is something was pushed server-side on Microsoft’s end in regards to a security or authentication change (who knows what specifically) and in that change it cut off communication with Outlook clients past a certain patch. I confirmed this was not last night’s patch that contained these changes, but one previously issued. I do not know anything more specific about this patch in question. This is why rolling back worked – it went to a client version that was before that change in how it talked to their servers. Why this was done in the middle of the day, I don’t know. Very unusual. All I’m willing to go into right now.

That explains it. (Thank heaven for anonymous posters!) As @NetDef says:

Admins: do not need to check for updates or re-apply updates. Just start Outlook. If you rolled back earlier today it’s safe to roll forward again to bring you back to current patched status.

The bug was a combination of a new security check on the client, and a back-end server patch/change. For now the back-end server change has been reverted for Office 365 Exchange tenants.

Translating that into English: Microsoft built some fancy new checking mechanism into the more recent versions of Windows-based Outlook. It was working just fine until, yesterday morning U.S. time, somebody changed something on Microsoft’s servers. Kaboom. No more Outlook.

Microsoft claims:

Root cause: A recent change to the Outlook client inadvertently resulted in this issue.

That’s sorta true. What clobbered everybody was some stupid change on a server.

Next steps:

– We’re reviewing our update procedures to isolate these issues prior to our deployment cycle.

– We’re analyzing our telemetry data to better identify these issues before they impact our customers. We’ll publish a post-incident report within five business days.

I could ask the obvious questions – most beginning with, “What in the blue blazes…?” or something more colorful – but you can fill those out yourself. Bottom line: Somebody at Microsoft changed something on a server, without testing the change, and it brought down Windows-based Outlook everywhere.

 

Deployment "cycle"? Puh-leeze. We saw the same stupidity with the Windows Search box bug back in February. Somebody threw a monkey wrench (er, spanner) in the server. Everybody got clobbered.

 

Kinda makes you feel warm and fuzzy.

 

If you thought an installed Windows version of Outlook would be more stable than a cloud version – or an iPad or Android or iPhone version, for that matter – this is what’s known as a comeuppance. 

 

We’re always looking for answers on AskWoody.

 

 

Outlook went down for four hours Wednesday. What happened?