Outlook now crashes at every startup, to users' despair

Microsoft is right now dealing with a barrage of criticism from distraught users who have Outlook crashing every time on startup. The bug, which Microsoft has acknowledged, is affecting multiple clients across organizations.

Outlook startup crashes

Outlook startup crashes have users up in arms online, from Twitter to Reddit. The issue appears to affect Office 365 business account and Outlook 2016 owners.

According to one of the affected users, Outlook opens for 2 seconds before crashing with an exception code 0xc0000005. The issue is so widespread that this user said they had received five reports about it in 10 minutes.

 I’ve just received 5 calls in 10 minutes about outlook opening for 2 seconds and closing. Is anyone experiencing this issue? Make that 6 calls. Seems to be 365 business on all accounts.

Yet another user reports:

I just got my second report today of Outlook crashing for the end user. I am working on the first one now and it won’t even open in safe mode with outlook.exe /safe.

On Twitter, user Lennon Kaufman says that they’re experiencing the same issue with Outlook 2016, which is not connected to any Office 365 account. They’re also having crash issues with Outlook 2019 connected to a Microsoft 365-based exchange.

Workaround

Via the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account, Microsoft said that it’s looking into whether a recent update triggered the Outlook startup crashes.

Apart from that, it appears that the bug doesn’t affect Outlook on the web or mobile clients. That explains why Microsoft is suggesting reverting to these alternatives as a temporary workaround.

We’re investigating an issue affecting user access to Outlook. Additional details can be found in the admin center under EX218604.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 15, 2020

In the meantime, some users on Reddit claim that rolling back the update resolved the issue for their Outlook clients.

For example, user Quintalis says that they used CMD to fix the issue. The user reports that they started experiencing the Outlook crash issue after installing the July 14, 2020 Patch Tuesday updates.

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

So, are you too experiencing any Outlook startup crash issues? Kindly let us know in the comments section below.

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