Microsoft acknowledged an issue in its Outlook for Microsoft 365, where a known bug is freezing or crashing the desktop client after it opened.
Noting that a specific path in the registry is left black for an unknown reason, Microsoft shared a few workarounds until it came up with a fix. Also, the company pulled out the latest Microsoft 365 update after users reported crashes on Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
An Unknown Bug in Microsoft
Microsoft’s native email client – Outlook, has been a daily driver for many people around the world. Since it comes along in the Microsoft 365 suite, most corporates have adopted it as an official email client too. Thus, Microsoft develops it constantly with new features and security controls.
But, an unknown bug in Outlook for Microsoft 365 on the desktop is causing issues to users – who reported freezing or crashes of the client briefly after launching it. Microsoft acknowledged this and published a support document on Thursday as;
“This issue occurs when the EmailAddress string data value under the Office identity is blank.”
They noted the Email Address string in
Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity\Identities
registry path being null, which could be the reason for app crashes. Saying that they don’t know why this is happening, Microsoft noted working on it right away. Until then, here are the workarounds they suggested;
- Sign out of Office and then sign back into Office to repopulate the identity registry settings. For more information, use Sign in to Office.
- If the identity is still not getting set properly, you can turn off Support Diagnostics which turns off the option to submit an In-App ticket using Help, Contact Support, and its feature path that triggers Outlook to stop responding by setting the following registry key (more info available here):[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Options\General]
“DisableSupportDiagnostics”=dword:00000001 - You can try manually setting the email address to the identity of the user that is seeing the issue in the registry path referenced in the issue specifics above.
Users affected by this issue will see an error as “0x01483052 exception codes with 0x000000000024074d fault offsets and 0x1328 faulting process IDs.”
The company is also pulling down the latest Microsoft 365 update since many have complained about app crashes of Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in the Office suite – when doing specific activities like viewing contact cards or hovering over a user’s name or photo.
