At mid-morning Wednesday within the U.S., Outlook stopped working. Dead in its tracks. Both the Click-to-Run model of Office (er, Microsoft) 365 and the put in (MSI) model of Outlook refused to start out:
Today once I went to examine my electronic mail, Outlook wouldn’t open; it could load the “Starting Outlook…” splash display screen, which might shut with out opening the Outlook window itself, and the taskbar icon went away. Looking in Reliability History, it states that Outlook has crashed.
I attempted opening in protected mode (it does the very same course of as described above) and restarting the pc to no avail. I even tried the complete restore (not the short one), redownloading and reactivating MS Office 2019, however no go.
Then, 4 or so hours later, Outlook out of the blue began working once more.There are so many packages operating round known as “Outlook” that it’s troublesome to nail down which variations of Outlook went AWOL. But it appears to be like like all the latest variations of Microsoft 365 Click-to-Run Current Channel – courting again to June 30’s Version 2006 Build 13001.20266, at the least – in addition to Office 2019 packed their luggage and left the station.Microsoft, in its inimitable means, left a path in its @MSFT365Standing tweets:
We’re investigating a difficulty affecting person entry to Outlook. We’re investigating whether or not a just lately deployed replace may very well be the supply of this concern. As a workaround, customers can make the most of Outlook on the net or their cell purchasers… (4 hours later) We’re rolling out a repair for this concern, and we anticipate the mitigation to achieve all clients over the following few hours.
So for 4 hours yesterday, you might get at your Outlook electronic mail by way of your iPad, or by hitting the web site, however the model of Outlook you most likely use in 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 particulars.Two apparent questions current themselves:What broke? There weren’t any new variations of Office pushed out yesterday. Yet, all around the world, thousands and thousands (if not lots of of thousands and thousands) of Outlook customers all had the rug pulled out from beneath them.
How did Microsoft repair it? There was no patch delivered, no new C2R model, no emergency replace for Outlook 2019. Microsoft’s resorted to some odd patch supply mechanisms currently (notably utilizing the Microsoft Store) and it’s had multiple-cumulative-update issues. But this repair apparently didn’t contact PCs in any respect.
Microsoft’s proffered clarification doesn’t go the sniff check:
There is a brand new symptom of Outlook crashing on launch beginning on 7/15/2020. A repair has been revealed however will take time to propagate to worldwide availability. Outlook will robotically search for the repair on launch, so if this concern persists by way of a number of launches please use Outlook Web Access (or your suppliers webmail interface) for an hour then strive once more. This downside just isn’t related to any of the 7/15/2020 safety patches so there isn’t a have to uninstall them if Outlook is not going to launch.
In truth, there weren’t any adjustments made to any PCs. Individual customers didn’t get new variations. Administrators didn’t push something out on their networks. Outlook simply out of the blue began working once more.Many individuals found that they may get Outlook working by rolling again a number of variations. Older variations of Outlook (each C2R and MSI) labored. The newer ones didn’t. The bug had nothing to do with particular patches.I used to be considering the mysteries of life, the universe and Outlook appcrashes, when an nameless publish appeared on AsokWoody:
Woody – can’t inform you my supply however mainly rumor is one thing was pushed server-side on Microsoft’s finish with reference to a safety or authentication change (who is aware of what particularly) and in that change it minimize off communication with Outlook purchasers previous a sure patch. I confirmed this was not final evening’s patch that contained these adjustments, however one beforehand issued. I have no idea something extra particular about this patch in query. This is why rolling again labored – it went to a shopper model that was earlier than that change in the way it talked to their servers. Why this was achieved in the course of the day, I don’t know. Very uncommon. All I’m keen to enter proper now.
That explains it. (Thank heaven for nameless posters!) As @NetDef says:
Admins: don’t have to examine for updates or re-apply updates. Just begin Outlook. If you rolled again earlier in the present day it’s protected to roll ahead once more to carry you again to present patched standing.
The bug was a mix of a brand new safety examine on the shopper, 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 constructed some fancy new checking mechanism into the newer variations of Windows-based Outlook. It was working simply nice till, yesterday morning U.S. time, any individual modified one thing on Microsoft’s servers. Kaboom. No extra Outlook.Microsoft claims:
Root trigger: A latest change to the Outlook shopper inadvertently resulted on this concern.
That’s sorta true. What clobbered everyone was some silly change on a server.
Next steps:
– We’re reviewing our replace procedures to isolate these points previous to our deployment cycle.
– We’re analyzing our telemetry information to higher establish these points earlier than they influence our clients. We’ll publish a post-incident report inside 5 enterprise days.
I may ask the apparent questions – most starting with, “What in the blue blazes…?” or one thing extra colourful – however you possibly can fill these out your self. Bottom line: Somebody at Microsoft modified one thing on a server, with out testing the change, and it introduced down Windows-based Outlook all over the place.Deployment “cycle”? Puh-leeze. We noticed the identical stupidity with the Windows Search field bug again in February. Somebody threw a monkey wrench (er, spanner) within the server. Everybody acquired clobbered.Kinda makes you are feeling heat and fuzzy.If you thought an put in Windows model of Outlook could be extra secure than a cloud model – or an iPad or Android or iPhone model, for that matter – that is what’s often known as a comeuppance. We’re at all times on the lookout for solutions on AsokWoody.
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