
Microsoft Outlook is crashing worldwide with 0xc0000005 errors - TrealTwan
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-outlook-is-crashing-worldwide-with-0xc0000005-errors/
======
16bytes
I still don't understand why Microsoft doesn't print human readable error code
instead of just "0xc0000005".

To figure out what the actual message is, you first have to figure out if you
are seeing a HRESULT or a NTSTATUS[1]. In this case the leading 0xC is an
invalid HRESULT, so it's for sure an NTSTATUS. Then you just look up the code
in the bottom two bytes [2].

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.

So, for sure an application error and not something that the user did or some
sort of system issue.

There are also "facility" codes which can give you more information what where
the issue is happening, but this code is just using the default.

I suppose this is better than when they would print the decimal value instead
of the hex. "WTF is error code 3221225477?"

[1] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/openspecs/windows_protocols...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/openspecs/windows_protocols/ms-erref/87fba13e-bf06-450e-83b1-9241dc81e781)

[2] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/openspecs/windows_protocols...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/openspecs/windows_protocols/ms-erref/596a1078-e883-4972-9bbc-49e60bebca55)

~~~
CWuestefeld
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.

~~~
kccqzy
This kind of pictograms always reminds me of Apple. When a Mac can't boot
because of corrupt boot files, it shows a "prohibit" sign.

I suppose the reasoning was the same—not all users can understand English. But
in this day and age a pictogram is in fact harder to search for because people
describe it differently.

~~~
perl4ever
>But in this day and age a pictogram is in fact harder to search for because
people describe it differently

"In this day and age" you can snap a picture of (or screenshot) something and
search Google with the image.

------
marricks
I wonder if large companies get more of a pass with outages then small ones?
Bias towards authority in a way.

If a service has a big enough base an outage could almost seem like a pass for
everyone. “Oo couldn’t do that this morning GITHUB was down.” Whereas if my
small GitLab server was down bosses could be “well why aren’t we on GitHub
like everyone else, it’s up now?”

When google calendar was down a bit ago I tried looking at random people
responses on twitter and many were “whew I get out of some meetings!”

Perhaps there is some accountability for large scale outages like these but it
really feels like consensus is often “shit happens” which is totally
reasonable just seems like it could hurt big companies a lot less.

~~~
marricks
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...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-
sabotaged-firefox-for-years/)

~~~
pmontra
> Changing from Gmail isn't easy because of all the other services and logins
> associated with it.

You can keep the Gmail account and start using a new one somewhere else. You
start registering to new services with your new account and gradually migrate
old services to it if they let you. You end up with gmail for social logins
(which hopefully you can migrate too) and little else.

I do have a Gmail account. I use it to login in Google when I work for a
customer which use the Google Cloud, when I have to upload videos to YouTube
(I logout after that) and for Google Play.

~~~
_jal
> You start registering to new services with your new account and gradually
> migrate old services

Try doing this with with thousands of employees with multiple devices and
varying computer skills, at the same time, while keeping a business running.
Don't forget to factor in multiple 2FA systems, that you also have more
service accounts than you probably think, and that your spam filters will
change behaviors (for that added bit of uncertainty).

 _Helpdesk needs valium, badly_

~~~
kbenson
Congratulations, you've identified a market need. If someone builds a tool to
do all this (if the market isn't saturated with them already), companies will
pay for it. There's plenty of tools to convert to/from Microsoft Active
Directory deployments or varying quality, I don't see why Google should be any
different.

------
miles
You can roll back to the previous version to restore access[1]:

"%Programfiles%\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun\officec2rclient.exe"
/update user updatetoversion=16.0.12827.20470

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/hrq0mn/outlook_im...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/hrq0mn/outlook_immediately_crashing_on_open_after/)

~~~
teh_klev
The article does actually point this out near the end.

~~~
miles
The article was edited to add the directions well after my comment.

~~~
teh_klev
My apologies.

~~~
miles
No worries at all - they didn't even mention that the article had been
amended, so most folks finding this HN thread now will likely feel just as you
did. I appreciate your comment, as it alerted me to the fact that there is now
an all-in-one page with a good overview of the issue and workarounds that I
can share with others.

~~~
dudus
It was amended probably because of the comment here.

------
ocdtrekkie
It's worth noting that this appears solely to be a failure with Office
365/Click-to-Run-based installations. If you buy your software instead of
subscribing to it, and service Office with traditional Windows Update
mechanisms... everything is fine today.

This is what happens when you rip out well-tested IT infrastructure that has a
reasonable update distribution process and entrust the cloud to update your
software for you.

~~~
WarOnPrivacy
>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.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
CtR is this containerized install-from-web platform that Microsoft came up
with for .NET applications. Yeah, it's actually a lot of years old. But
generally speaking, if you get an Office disc or ISO file (say, from
Microsoft's Volume Licensing Center), and install it, you get a traditional
Office install that gets serviced via KB downloads from Windows Update. If you
get Office via a web download from office.com, you get CtR, which self-updates
itself sort of like modern web browsers.

A huge difference for business is that Windows Update allows you to
approve/deny updates and cache them on a local server with WSUS, whereas CtR
leaves each machine to go talk with Microsoft amongst itself on what to
install and mostly cuts your IT staff out of the loop.

~~~
muttled
You can gain some control of updates via GPO or installing with a config XML
specified but you don't get anywhere near the granularity of WSUS.

------
hs86
What is going on with Outlook for Windows? For years, it froze its entire UI
whenever there was some network lag on the IMAP server, and the recent
improvements for Outlook strangely focus only on their Mac, web, and mobile
versions. Does the Windows version still have a future? It seems to be stuck
in some maintenance limbo.

~~~
cosmie
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...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/semi-annual-
enterprise-channel)

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

[3] [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/using-net-core-to-
prov...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/using-net-core-to-provide-
power-query-for-excel-on-mac/)

~~~
techntoke
Windows 10 gets a lot of love too. So much that updates often brick the entire
install and deletes files and folders.

------
stkai
If you're on Office 365, the Outlook web client is great
([https://outlook.office.com](https://outlook.office.com)). In fact, I haven't
used the full client since 2015, except for rare cases.

Or, you can enjoy the quiet while email is down :)

~~~
csydas
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...)

~~~
mdip
Hmm; Maybe I'm not a power user of Office 365 Outlook, but I'm on openSUSE
Tumbleweed, running Firefox and that's _all_ I use for work e-mail. I think I
have Chrome _and_ Chromium on here, but I haven't used them in months.

At this point, if the OS wasn't an issue, I wouldn't use the full client, ever
(for all of the reasons others have provided). The only gremlin I've
encountered, routinely, is a situation where the rich editor doesn't see a
"space" until I've typed a character after it. It's mildly distracting at
worst, and far less of a problem than typing and having the thing just sit
there like it'll get to my input as soon as the spirit moves it.

On that note, really, all of Microsoft's web products have been pleasant to
use. They've become good enough that I rarely end up in the LibreOffice
equivalents. The "Teams" client for Linux (in Preview; I run the Insiders
version) integrates well -- clicking links from my calendar opens meetings.
Some things are a little off, but are a few settings away from being ideal for
me. It's lacking some of the features of its more developed Windows client,
but it isn't as bad as the mac Lync client was back when I last had an
opportunity to experience Microsoft's conferencing platform on non-Windows.

------
EvanAnderson
This is probably a good time to ask: Are any of you receiving your checks from
Microsoft for all the beta (and, apparently alpha) testing that you're doing?
Mine aren't showing up. I'm not sure who to contact about it. /s

In the calls that I've gotten my tiny little Customer base has had something
like 25 people "down" today. At least ActiveSync on phones and OWA were still
working. I know some people were miffed that full-blown Outlook was unusable
because it's a major part of their workflow.

How did this get past QA? It's simply mind-blowing...

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

------
kerng
I always thought I really disliked Outlook ( because of so many issues) until
I worked for this well known startup and started using Gmail. Man, how I miss
all the Outlook issues... at least it was good for reading/writing email.

Disliking something can be quite relative I guess...

~~~
signal11
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.

------
cwkoss
I am constantly amazed at the number of bugs and seemingly obvious UI issues
pervasive throughout microsoft products. It feels like their product
philosophy is "jack of all trades, master of none" \- they try to support so
many uses cases that there isn't a cohesive best practice anywhere.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
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.

~~~
tjalfi
They laid off thousands of testers in 2014[0].

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that quality plummeted afterwards.

[0] [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/08/how-m...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/08/how-microsoft-dragged-its-development-practices-into-
the-21st-century/4/)

~~~
sabarn01
Most were moved to dev. The difference is Dev are responsible for writing
tests now which was not true prior.

------
Arnavion
(0xC000005 == STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION, accessing a memory address that
couldn't be accessed, ie a segfault.)

~~~
sebazzz
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.

------
jyrkesh
I don't know if the article mentions this because (ironically) Bleeping
Computer is now down, but you may be able to fix this by holding Ctrl while
opening Outlook in order to start it in Safe Mode. Whenever I'm in a broken
state, I do this, load it up fully, close it again, and start it normally.
Then things usually work okay.

I had to do that this morning on my work machine, not sure if it was related
to this issue.

~~~
mastazi
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.

------
mathogre
I had the problem with Outlook; I have to use it for work. While waiting for
the help desk to get back to me on Outlook crashing, I used "quick repair" and
it cleaned up the problem.

[https://redmondmag.com/articles/2019/05/10/repairing-
office-...](https://redmondmag.com/articles/2019/05/10/repairing-
office-365.aspx)

------
fortran77
Yup! I just updated Windows and got a crash. Relaunched it and it was ok

    
    
        Faulting application name: OUTLOOK.EXE, version: 
        16.0.13001.20266, time stamp: 0x5ef2a169
        Faulting module name: mso98win32client.dll, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x5ef2771f
        Exception code: 0xc0000005
        Fault offset: 0x00000000000beef2
        Faulting process id: 0x3be0
        Faulting application start time: 0x01d65ad25f628bf7
        Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft 
        Office\root\Office16\OUTLOOK.EXE
        Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Office16\mso98win32client.dll
    

It's also very nice how easy it is to roll back one program on Windows!

    
    
         officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.12827.20470

~~~
Shorel
So that's why I have not been affected.

I only shutdown "my" work laptop on weekends.

~~~
WarOnPrivacy
Rebooting didn't work for us. Rollback did tho.

------
cjhanks
Somewhere there is a programmer that tried to fix a bug in 10+ year old legacy
code (mso98win32client.dll) who has learned the bugs of legacy are features of
today.

------
imperialdrive
Wild - I experienced this first thing in the morning. I'm running Windows 20H2
(19042.388) and Office Beta (v2008, b13102.20002) and assumed it was from the
recent updates. Online repair didn't work, full repair didn't either, but a
complete uninstall/reboot/reinstall worked and preserved my profile just fine
(I thought it was perhaps the profile too but guess not) - Wild!

------
aaomidi
This a really bad outage because it happened to my partner and there is
nothing obvious about what went wrong. It just...closes.

~~~
WarOnPrivacy
> 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.

------
monroeta
After 5 hours of uninstalling and failed windows system restore points, and a
quick 24 google search worked! The below link mentioned really fixed the issue
on multiple pcs. Thank you!!!!

"%Programfiles%\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun\officec2rclient.exe"
/update user updatetoversion=16.0.12827.20470

------
WarOnPrivacy
Got a call on this a few hours ago. Found the above article & the rollback set
us right for now.

------
joaogoncalv_es
I had an user with Office 2016 who just had this problem. I didn’t found this
article in time and I solved it with a clean installation of Office.

(Safe mode did not work)

~~~
techntoke
Ask Microsoft to reimburse you for your time.

------
wolfi1
I'm relieved it's not only me. For the time being I resort to safe mode

------
ed_elliott_asc
With OWA there is no need to use the outlook client anymore

------
gfody
if you don't want to rollback to the previous version you can also use safe
mode (hold ctrl when you launch outlook)

~~~
nubb
Safe mode still crashes for my users.

------
monroeta
The link to reinstall old update worked!

------
bshep
For now Outlook for Mac seems unaffected

------
venki80
Yikes. Use Outlook Web Access (OWA)!!

------
DudeInBasement
Welcome to windowsME

------
sowellecho
The scrutiny of the actual value added by middle managers during the remote
work era gets a minor respite.

Boss: "Why didn't you get any work done?"

Middle manager: "The dog (Microsoft Outlook) ate my homework (email)"

