Outlook went down for four hours yesterday. What happened? How did Microsoft fix it?

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Spoiler: No, there was no buggy update. No emergency patch. Just sheer incompetence. Microsoft promises to give us details in five days, after the rag
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lmacri, GreatAndPowerfulTech, rontpxz81, Elly, Mr. Natural

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Thanks for identifying how far back the problem goes.  I replied to your post yesterday I am running Ver 2006 Build 13001.20266 which should have crashed.  All I can say is I went on line at 06:30 EDT and worked all day without issue other than the occasional Yahoo server error.  Maybe I launched Outlook outside the time people were seeing it not open and I was not affected.  I can only offer one user’s experience.

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woody

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Same here. I opened mine about 9:00 am used it all day with no problems.

Barry
Windows 11 v23H2

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woody

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Interesting. That’s the build that crashed on Lawrence Abrams. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-outlook-is-crashing-worldwide-with-0xc0000005-errors-how-to-fix/

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GreatAndPowerfulTech

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Hmmm, I don’t use Outlook but MS’s techworthy explanation, as usual, is wordy to the point where it makes no sense.

“The Committee Club Association Group meeting cycle will determine…”

Whaaaa???

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I thought its because of the new update I installed for an app or a Win 10 2004 issue, I got mad and decided to do a clean install of 1909, I had a bootable USB of 1909 on my desk and had enough motivation to do a clean install because my friend also told me he didn’t updated to 2004 yet.

Is the Outlook problem solved now?

Thank you.

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woody

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From Woody’s ComputerWorld article:

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.

The short form is that it’s working, but Microsoft offers no explanation.

On permanent hiatus {with backup and coffee}
offline▸ Win10Pro 2004.19041.572 x64 i3-3220 RAM8GB HDD Firefox83.0b3 WindowsDefender
offline▸ Acer TravelMate P215-52 RAM8GB Win11Pro 22H2.22621.1265 x64 i5-10210U SSD Firefox106.0 MicrosoftDefender
online▸ Win11Pro 22H2.22621.1992 x64 i5-9400 RAM16GB HDD Firefox116.0b3 MicrosoftDefender

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GreatAndPowerfulTech, woody

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I use Outlook msi version 2006 Build 13001.20266  on 1909 and I was not aware of any particular problem. Outlook was running all day yesterday.

 

Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7640 Core Ultra 7 155H 32GB Win 11 Pro 23H2 (22631.4890)
Dell Inspiron 15 7580 i7 16GB Win 11 pro 24H2 (26100.3194),
Microsoft 365 Version 2502 (18526.20118)
Location: UK

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woody

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Now also listed as a known issue for every version of Windows 10, 8.1 and 7:

Outlook closes unexpectedly or you might receive an error when attempting to open

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woody

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So its working for now. Thank you.

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woody

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Good thing we moved everything off premises to the Microsoft Cloud where these things never ever happen.  Oh, wait, never mind.

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abbodi86, Elly, woody, Cybertooth

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Outlook is the first program I open every morning when I sign in.  Outlook fetches mail from three email accounts, including Outlook.com.

I didn’t notice anything at all yesterday.

Fully updated 2004.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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woody

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Here is the part that really concerns me.

I had the exact same problem running Outlook 2019 Stand Alone (MSI) and I do not tie into an Exchange or Office 365 Server. I simply have a pop account to my PST file and download messages from my ISP. Also I log into my PC with a local account NOT a Microsoft account. How did they fix it for me ???

I certainly am not an expert on how Outlook talks to Microsoft but to me,  in my situation, there should not be much talking at all as I should be able to run with NO internet connection to simply access my mail locally but apparently there is more talking then we know ???

Ideas ??

 

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woody

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I’ve been wondering the same thing. Perhaps we’ll find out in five days.

Or perhaps not.

The Windows Search box bug was similar – it turned belly up whether you were using Bing search or not.

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An email from the O365 message center hit my inbox today. Part of the message is shown below. It is a reminder that Microsoft Office 2013 users will no longer be supported on Office 365 cloud services after October 13, 2020.

It’s the usual initial message all companies release when they prepare to abandon a product. Office 2013 will continue to work, but they are wiping their hands of any future issues that may occur with Office 2013 connecting to O365 cloud services.

The original statement was released by the message center back in September 2019 but the message was just reissued because it was “prematurely removed”. I don’t know when but it seems a bit of a co-incidence this would be re-released the day after all the Outlook drama.

Red Ruffnsore

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Elly, abbodi86

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The way Microsoft is behaving/communicating on this feels like something bad is going on.
I reached out to our TAM today and all he could tell was that he does not have more information either from the engineers and that there will be a PIR over the next 5 business days.

So how can you already know you will need 5 business days to do a PIR? Someone obviously fixed the issue ‘magically’ so in order to fix it, you usually need to know what change(s) broke it. It almost looks like Microsoft is sitting on a huge 0-day vulnerability they tried to patch yesterday server-side and broke a ton of recent Current Channel builds by doing that, had to roll back the change and are now buying themselves a few days time to patch it after all before being able to share further details that would publicly expose the vulnerability.

But that’s my gut feeling 🙂

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woody

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Gee whiz. This can’t be related to all this twitter nonsense, could it?

“Uh Bill, sorry to bug you but we had to reset your password.”

Red Ruffnsore

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My outlook Click to run v13001.20266 failed to start. Of course I panicked and went into windows app settings and did a quick office repair. That brought outlook back to life, thankfully.

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And this is once again why we are not moving to the cloud anytime soon but sticking with our on-premise, tested-before-patched, Exchange server.

We’ve even ensured that mobile users connect to our Exchange via their phone’s native email app (Apple mail, Samsung mail, etc.), NOT the Outlook app, because that hooks into the cloud-Outlook rather than our actual working on-site instance.

No matter where you go, there you are.

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The BleepingComputer article fixed my standalone Outlook 2016 of which I am very grateful. I have daily and weekly backups of my PST, contacts, rules, etc. but not of the Outlook profile itself. There are four email accounts configured in the profile so it would take a while to get everything rebuilt if the profile became corrupted. Can the profile be backed up and, if so, how can it be restored if Outlook can’t launch?

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Export this registry key. You’ll have to enter passwords for each account but all settings are restored.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Profiles

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DooDahMan

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I have questions.

1) Did this affect only users with accounts hosted on Microsoft servers?

2) If someone has no accounts hosted on Microsoft servers, why would a problem on Microsoft’s servers affect a standalone installation?

3) Does Outlook send telemetry to Microsoft, and, if so, what? Do they know when I’m using others’ email servers? What do they know about my email?

Group K(ill me now)

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[Paul T]

1. According to #2281110, no.
2. Ask MS.
3. Ditto.

cheers, Paul

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Paul T.

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RTEsysadmin, woody

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[woody]

RTEsysadmin wrote:

3) Does Outlook send telemetry to Microsoft, and, if so, what? Do they know when I’m using others’ email servers? What do they know about my email?

Hi RTEsysadmin:

I can’t answer your first two questions (those details might become clearer once Microsoft has released their promised post-incident report about the 15-Jul-2020 Outlook crashes), but in my MS Outlook 2019 CR2 I can go to File | Office Account | Account Privacy and click the Manage Settings button to review my privacy settings as shown in the attached image. Each section has a Read More link that takes you to a support article with the usual cryptic legalese but you might find some helpful information there. One of those linked articles, Diagnostic Data in Office, describes the difference between required and optional data collection and notes that “Diagnostic data may contain “personal data” as defined by Article 4 of the European GDPR, but it does not contain your name, your email address, or any content from your files.“.

————-
64-bit Win 10 Pro v1909 build 18363.900 * MS Office Home and Business 2019 C2R v2006 Build 13001.20384

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by woody.

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RTEsysadmin

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As I mentioned before, on July 16, I did a clean install of Win 10 1909, reinstalled Office 365, and noticed Outlook works again the next day.

Anyway, wanted to post an update and I will also stick with Win 1909.

 

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Could it be that Outlook does a Phone Home on every start to verify that its licence is still valid? If the license server has an error this could prevent Outlook from starting. Maybe someone can sniff the network traffic Outlook sends out.

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Biiljoy

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^ You would have to have the keys and encryption scheme they use it’s not plain text.  I had telemetry blocked through the firewall by ip and did not experience this problem and used outlook on the day and time in question with no ill effects.  Phone home is indeed the right term.  There was an article where some reporter wanted to know how much her internet of things in the house were phoning home and she made a middle box that recorded hits to dns and which device they came from, and chromecasts were chatting 24/7.  It’s not unreasonable to think microsoft applications on a computer, from software they charge a fortune for, isn’t doing the same thing.  I have no proof but like I said I block the telemetry haha.

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