It was a typical morning – July 15, 2020 – for many Windows users. They turned on their computers – some of them perhaps seeing that they had received an Outlook program update last night – and then tried to open their email in Outlook… And suddenly their day was ruined.
Many Office 365 business users found that their Outlook email service stopped working immediately after launching. Hours later, Microsoft admitted on Twitter that there was indeed a problem.
We are investigating whether a recently applied update could be the source of this issue. As a workaround, users can use Outlook on the web or the mobile app. Additional details can be found in the admin center under EX218604 and OL218603.
Later, Microsoft posted on Twitter that it “will be releasing a fix for this issue and we expect the mitigation to reach all customers in the next few hours.”
The failure appears to have been the result of an Outlook update that was rolled out last night. The update was intended to give Outlook, across all its different versions, the same capabilities , but it apparently failed.
According to suggestions on the Reddit Sysadmin forum, you can fix the issue on local computers by rolling back to monthly release 20470. You do this with the following steps:
Go to the administrator command prompt and type:
cd “\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun”
Then, run the following as administrator,
officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.12827.20470
At this time, no known Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) fix has been released.
This is a quick workaround that is better than nothing. Once Microsoft fixes the issue, which is expected to happen in the near future, it would be logical to roll back the update via the official patch.
If you use Outlook as a service, try, as Microsoft suggests, using the Outlook web interface or mobile app
