Microsoft Outlook is crashing worldwide with 0xc0000005 errors (opens in new tab)

I think an interesting counterpoint to my observation is Firefox claimed they lost a lot of users because Google services just broke in odd ways only on Firefox so users moved to Chrome.[1]

My counter to that would be, even though Firefox was and is a big company it's easy to change. A lot of services like Outlook, Chrome, or Gmail or just downright colossal at this point. Changing from Gmail isn't easy because of all the other services and logins associated with it.

Not to mention, Gsuite, GitHub, Outlook, and such are all very corporate. Higher ups make the decision as to when to use these often enough, so you can't just say "this has kind of failed us a couple times lets try something else".

So all in all, I still stand by my point, entrenched big companies probably get more of a pass.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

I agree, but I think there's also a bit more to it.

Thinking specifically of cloud infrastructure, if you run your systems on infrastructure that is also used by your largest partners and customers, then your outages will tend to coincide, so (a) nobody cares that you're down because they're down too, and (b) even if they did care, they're busy enough worrying about their own systems that they have less time to come at you.

An example would be a company specializing in Shopify "apps" running their systems on GCP because that's where Shopify runs... if GCP goes down then Shopify itself is also likely down as well, and you'll get more mileage out of the "sorry, GCP is down" justification (if it's even needed).

I think with a smaller product you're trying to fight for market share and retaining a client - Microsoft is so large and with so much momentum and dug so deeply into their customers that this sort of thing doesn't cause them to want to find something else. If it hurts to change, it's easy to excuse something like this.

> Bias towards authority in a way.

I think it's more "momentum". With a smaller company that affects a small number of users, the possibility of cutting your losses is quite feasible. On the other hand, with Outlook you've got your whole org using it, your servers running on it, your customers integrated with it, custom rules setup - a cut and run is just not simple.

Honestly though, I really don't get why rollback isn't more common for these larger pieces of software. Just some logic to detect multiple crashes, check if a rollback would break anything (i.e. dependencies) and then rollback. If you remove so much power from the average user in your OS, you ought to really have some amazing automated procedure for these scenarios.

I thought they also do limited roll-out as well? I think I remember the Windows anniversary bricked a bunch of machines in the limited roll-out and they just pushed it out anyway?

The complete lack of control as to when an update is performed is astounding - I know there are some settings to stop this, but apparently there are cases where that setting reverts back to auto or you need to switch it back on in order to manually update. I remember the last straw for MS and myself was accidentally clicking update just before a meeting whilst on very low battery, with no way to back out and no charger on hand. It didn't end well.

These days if something is "Windows only", it goes in a VM along with other software I don't trust.

Do they get more of a pass?

I don't really know of any small services I gave up on because of outages more or less than I would for any other service regardless of company size....

The complexity of a product probably makes folks less likely to 'walk away' but I'm not convinced they do more or less for any other given company based on size alone.

MS definitely has customers like hospitals and the military that will be very upset and frantic in any outage.

At least in the days of yore MS distinguished itself with support for that kind of client, famously sending service technicians in helicopters out to remote installations.

It would be interesting to hear, in the new era that they're in, if that kind of thing continues.

I think what you're describing with GitHub is a modern version of the old maxim "No-one ever got fired for choosing IBM"

Headline: Outlook crashing worldwide

Subhead: Are we better off?

One angle to look at this from is that if Slack or GitHub goes down, there's a good chance your competitors are being held up too. It's like an armistice on (your corner of) capitalism. Whereas if it's just your system, you've been put at a slight disadvantage.

Also, unless it's happening every week there's probably an element of, "well it doesn't make me regret the overall choice to use this service, so there's no sense being upset about it".

Most of the customers are too dumb to really care, and if they did, what would they do

It will take you 3 years to unwind your Microsoft business. Few people with that level of rage over poor Windows/Office software can maintain it that long. Normally, companies yell at the IT Staff, unless it's a really bad problem, then they yell at the TAM or account manager, who takes some abuse, wears an appropriate sad/chastened face, and talks about the Microsoft release ring framework, and that most problems are your fault because you don't follow a similar model.

In my experience recently with O365, these issues usually are an update issue related to some regression in Windows 10 combined with an Office issue, or changes to Microsoft's authentication infrastructure. Microsoft has a unique understanding and methodology for making things good enough to persist -- they don't need to sell the product anymore, just make it not suck too much.

The first issue is because no human can keep a product working that has like 50 different active releases while the company prioritizes pushing out slop. The second issue is usually tied to a product release or revision, combined with new infrastructure. (Especially if it's in new IP space)

A zillion years ago I was able to see some of the internal communications around the development of OS/2. One topic was the way that non-system floppies would (fail to) boot when left in the PC. What the user would see was something like (I forget the exact numbers)

SYS!012345

SYS!876543

...and they were supposed to go look that up in some reference book to see what it meant.

The question was why they weren't outputting something human readable like "Unable to boot from non-system floppy". And the answer to that question was that, as an international company, they couldn't expect everyone to understand English.

So why not output multiple different languages? Well, the code to output the message has to fit in the floppy's boot sector, so the space is very tight.

And so there was discussion about whether it makes sense to give up having only 99% of users understand it, and instead have 0% understanding.

I think the killer argument was the person who suggested outputting a message something like

  ______
 | |__| |
 |  ()  | X
 |______|

which would just barely fit, and I think is almost universally understandable. Of course, the inscrutable message eventually stuck anyway.

> which typically means it's a bug where the program accidentally is trying to read outside of its memory space.

I tracked this down with process explorer the other day. What I determined is that outlook is trying to load it's DLLs but the permissions on the FS prevent the DLLs from being read by the user.

I reset the permissions for all subfolders in C:\Program Data\Microsoft Common and c:\Program Files\Microsoft\Office and it started working again for me.

Same for their OS, it seems to ignore power users completely. Just a few months ago I was going to connect to an SMB share by using \\nas\Downloads and it just wouldn't work, started a network troubleshooter that couldn't troubleshoot anything.

If it had just told me that the name could not be resolved I would have figured out that I needed the full domain suffix because ipconfig wasn't showing it.

This issue goes way back in Microsofts history, always getting on my nerves as a power user. But at the same time probably the best OS for any other type of user.

I think you overestimate how useful "human readable error codes" would be: https://i.imgur.com/SL88Z6g.jpg

I really enjoyed reading this, thanks!

> In this case it's just error code 5: "STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION", which is a memory access error, which typically means it's a bug where the program accidentally is trying to read outside of its memory space.

What would be a (more) user-friendly error message for this though, given the quite technical nature of the error?

My experience with Azure and O365/M365 especially, is that the human readable errors are often very misleading.

They'll point you in a direction that is irrelevant to the error. I just wish the references were better.

>Office 365/Click-to-Run-based installations. If you buy your software instead of subscribing to it...

I've never been clear on what CtR describes. The first CtR Office was Home & Student 2010, which was a purchase.

I can spend a lot of cash up front on Exchange and Office, then deal with constantly patching them. Or I can spend only per seat/per month and the patching is automatic and the service is likely more reliable. After 3 years the costs are almost the same. Its not like my private environment is so much more stable than an MS datacenter. And the software has the same amount of bugs.

Microsoft switched to no longer providing updated ISOs for Office 2019 and actively pushes Office 365. Plus their package management and update tools for enterprises are riddled with their own issues that makes managing hotfixes and updates a major PIA.

But the salesguy said these things wouldn't happen!

Would have to disagree. With any ad/tracking protection or non-chromium based browsers, the web client is not very good. For MacOS, it constantly requires reloads in order to get different folders, emails, or other basic functionality (Calendar, Categories, etc) to work correctly. The text editor is completely random in what it decides to do with formatting, links automatically have a gigantic preview link inserted into the text body, the UI is very much so different than the Outlook Client UI and does not port over any of the Outlook Client items (this is more a design decision in general from Microsoft on what is client side vs what is server side...)

The Web Client in its current form is functional, in that I can write and receive emails, but the experience is greatly diminished. Don't mistake me for liking the Outlook client (I am a very modest email user, no more than 400 some per day + a Tetris-style calendar), but this load crashes the client on a daily basis, on start up it takes a good 30 seconds before the client becomes responsive (with multiple local profile rebuilds), and sometimes just crashing randomly when reading certain HTML formatted emails.

Outlook is an exercise in frustration in general that unfortunately my entire company has built its foundation upon. The core ideas are great, but the execution on all fronts is awful. I'm actually almost disappointed when I open the mobile app and it __hasn't completely changed some UI/UX element__ as daily changes are the norm for me.

(all this being said, I'm shocked that Gmail somehow took Outlooks unusualness as a challenge and designed a worse UI/UX experience...)

... apparently you have to know that your (personal) Office 365 account is no good here? I thought maybe Microsoft cleaned up their confusing mess of logins a few years back. Perhaps not!

> You can't sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school account instead.

Of course it works if you instead go to https://www.outlook.com/

I have users that seem to have redirect loop issues with Outlook Online related to this outage. But I do agree their web client is nice :)

I would prefer to use the website, but I never got desktop reminders to work properly (i.e stay on screen and not hidden behind other windows). That's on macOS. Calendar and tasks without reminders is pretty much useless for me.

Except email labels (aka search folders) are severely limited

I think it is probably a very large program but does have some legacy cruft they probably can't fix easily. Either because backwards compatibility for COM or due to that if you rewrite something to be async the callers also need to be async and callee need to be non-blocking[0].

However, Outlook is very much actively developed and myself being a Premium user am receiving new features now and then, like UI refreshes etc.

[0] http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-y...

It still freezes (as in says “not responding) for ten seconds when I type the first character in the search/filter box above the email list. How does something like that to pass through testing?

Something that scales with mailbox size, network latency or similar is happening on the UI thread in Microsoft Outlook. This boggles my mind every time it happens, which is every day.

Something tells me Outlook is a huge pile of legacy C++ that no one dares rewrite any major part of even in the face of issues like this.

If you look at the release notes[1], Outlook for Windows is getting a lot of love too. The majority of updates are performance and bug fixes, but the UI issue you mentioned highlights the need for this type of TLC in the Windows client. That said, the frequency you receive these will be pretty dependent on which release cycle your install is set up for, as it can range from monthly to semi-annually.

The Mac, web, and mobile versions are getting a whole lot of feature releases in comparison to the Windows client, but virtually all of them are intended to bring those other clients to feature parity with the Windows client. I've interpreted this as more of Microsoft treating these alternate platforms as first-class citizens finally, rather than as neglect of the Windows clients.

This also isn't limited to just the Outlook client - it's a trend across the entire Office suite. For example, Power Query[2] is a really neat and powerful ETL system hiding within Excel (as well as used in PowerBI, and originating in SQL Server Analysis Services). It's been available for years in Excel for Windows, but only recently became usable on Excel for Mac thanks to a major refactor[3] to port it to .NET Core and strip out Windows dependencies. Eventually this will reach feature parity with and replace the legacy Power Query code in the Windows Excel client, then all net new development will be cross-platform and available on both clients simultaneously.

All things considered, I view the resource allocation across the platforms as a positive. Presuming the feature development happening for the non-Windows clients are as similarly cross-platform as the Power Query effort, it'll eventually lead to cleaned up Windows clients with decades of legacy cruft refactored out, feature parity and consistency across platforms, and substantially greater velocity as those resources currently split between platforms eventually consolidate and focus on a unified, cross-platform, and cleaned up codebase. And if the refactors continue to prioritize .NET Core, it also bodes well for an official Linux client eventually.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/semi-annual-e...

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/power-query-wha...

[3] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/using-net-core-to-prov...

Mac/Web/Mobile all lag behind native Outlook for Windows. If they're getting extra love, it's because they need it.

Windows is a second-class citizen in the new Microsoft. You only have to use it regularly to understand that.

That worked perfect for me also. "%Programfiles%\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun\officec2rclient.exe" /update user updatetoversion=16.0.12827.20470

After 5 hours of failed attempts and many failed system restore points the updatetoversion link above worked on multiple pcs

So that's why I have not been affected.

I only shutdown "my" work laptop on weekends.

Blame it on beef

Well for many end users at large companies they won't have the authority to do so and will have to wait for their support group to do so, assuming they let the update through.

Some have a victim pool, er, test pool, to help protect from such as this

The article does actually point this out near the end.

What's wrong with it? Just curious, I use Outlook for work and my main pet peeve is that

i) local search isn't great and

ii) in general, the application UI is very 'delicate' -- e.g., I have mail rules that move mailing lists to a folder. I browse through them from time to time but housekeeping those is a nightmare-- Outlook consistently freezes while deleting larger numbers of email.

I like gmail fine for personal email. I don't see how anyone gets work done with it.

I feel like this has only really been the case since about 2015, so instead of ascribing it to a "jack of all trades" philosophy I believe it can be more readily explained by a "lets hire a bunch of webdevs to work on our desktop OS" philosophy.

I just pay it forward. I've written so many bugs.

I wonder if this is an attack vector. On one hand it isn't because usually the HTTP traffic of Exchange is encrypted, on the other hand it is a crash triggered by a remote condition.

The article mentions this, but it says that apparently, with this specific bug, you also Have to hold Ctrl every subsequent time you re-open Outlook - it’s not a one-off fix. They suggest going back to the previous release as an alternative.

> there is nothing obvious about what went wrong. It just...closes.

Yeah, that's disconcerting from a support standpoint. Fortunately, I was able to remotely load their event logs and get the status code. DDG pointed right to the above article.

Ask Microsoft to reimburse you for your time.

Safe mode still crashes for my users.