Microsoft Outlook bug prevents viewing or creating emails worldwide

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Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is affected worldwide by a bug in the desktop client that prevents users from viewing emails or creating new ones.

After Microsoft released new updates for Microsoft Office today, users of the Outlook desktop client found that they could only see partial emails and could no longer create new ones.

When attempting to view an email, instead of seeing the entire message body, they only see a small portion of the email content, as shown below.

Missing Outlook email content
Source: Reddit

To make it even more frustrating, all of the previously written content will disappear when writing a new email and pressing enter.

Outlook email text disappearing when you press enter
Source: BleepingComputer

The Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account has tweeted that they are investigating an issue with "email message visibility in Outlook," and that Outlook on the Web is unaffected.

Microsoft 365 tweet

In an incident status message in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center titled 'EX218604: Users experiencing Outlook connection issues and crashes', Microsoft suggests users use web and mobile clients until the issue is resolved.

Title: Issue affecting viewing email content in Outlook

User Impact: Users may be unable to view email message content within Outlook.

More info: Initial reports indicate that Outlook on the web is unaffected and users with access to Outlook on the web can view email messages there while we work on a solution.

Current status: We're gathering and analyzing data in an effort to isolate the cause of impact. Initial reports indicate that impact is specific to the Outlook client and users with access to other protocols, such as Outlook on the web or the Outlook mobile app, can view message content in those platforms as a potential workaround.

Scope of impact: This issue could affect any user attempting to view an email message in the Outlook client.

How to fix the Microsoft Outlook crashes

If you are experiencing this issue in Microsoft Outlook, users have reported that you can fix it by rolling back to a previous version of Microsoft Outlook.

Method 1: Roll back Microsoft Office to latest June 2020 release

To roll back to the June 24, 2020, release and fix the Microsoft Outlook crashes, please follow these steps:

Open a command prompt by clicking on the Start Menu and typing CMD. When the 'Command Prompt' result appears, click on it. In the command prompt type cd "\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun" and press enter. You will now be in the ClickToRun folder. Type officec2rclient.exe" /update user updatetoversion=16.0.13901.20462 and press enter.

Entering commands in Command Prompt

Microsoft Office will now download the specified version of Microsoft Office and roll back to that previous version. Please be patient as this may take a few minutes or longer, depending on your computer and Internet connection speed.

Rolling back Microsoft Office to the previous version

When the updates are finished installing, you will be shown a screen stating 'Updates were installed.' You can press the Close button on this screen.

Microsoft Office updates were installed

Microsoft Outlook will now be rolled back to the previous version, and you should be able to start Microsoft Outlook again. You can now close the Command Prompt by clicking on the X button.

Please let us know if this works for you.

This is a developing story.

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