Issues with Microsoft Outlook (August 2019)?

[German]Are there issues with Microsoft Outlook since the beginning of August 2019? The program starts and then stops responding. Occurs with Outlook 2016 on various computers. Here is a description of the issue.

Description of the issue

German blog reader Mark Heitbrink contacted me yesterday by mail and informed me about a pretty stupid bug he had.

have you noticed any Outlook issues since last week?
I have it on 2 computers, Outlook starts and then stops responding. Deleting a profile doesn't help. It is not regenerated, because Outlook disappears into nirvana during setup.

On one [system] it helped to uninstall 2016 and install 2019, the other one was already 2019.

Was there anything about the patches from the end of July?

I wasn't aware of any know issues with Outlook 2016 caused by July 2019 updates.

Asking the Internet

A short search in the Internet revealed this Microsoft support article dealing with Outlook that won't open due loading profile issues.

Outlook won't open or is stuck at loading profile

Last Updated: June 26, 2019

ISSUE

After updating to Monthly Channel Version 1905 (Build 11629.20196) and higher, Outlook may hang at loading profile or won't start. You may notice that if you open Task Manager that other Office processes are unexpectedly listed even though you did not open the application. If you end those processes it may enable Outlook to then open normally.

STATUS: FIXED

On June 25th, 2019, the Outlook Team made a change to the service to fix this issue. If you are still seeing this issue, restart Outlook a couple of times so it can pick up the service change.

The support article describes the above error picture and the article also contains suggested solutions. Eureka, that's it. Small blemish: The status of this problem was already reported as fixed on June 25, 2019. In my opinion, the problem is also related to Outlook from Office 365 – and not Office 2016. There is this lifewire article that also deals with Outlook repair – but I'm not sure how useful the article is.

Additional information from Mark

I had offered Mark to post the topic on his blog if he could give me some more keywords. Mark did that and sent me the following addition.

Everything very confusing. With this device the problems disappeared after I allowed the active tests of the NCSI again.

Before that came during the setup "The feature was deactivated by the administrator" and then you should allow "UseOnlineContent" again, but what only works as long as Outlook knows that it's mainly online …?

Since I switch off NCSI everywhere,  I don't know why this computer is on stike.

The abbreviation NCSI refers to the Network Connection Status Indicator (in this forum post someone had problems with it in May 2019 – and in January 2019 there were also issues). In this KB article Microsoft also dealt with the mentioned test process. There are indications that Outlook may not be able to connect to a mail server when NCSI is disabled. Afterwards Mark made a correction:

Correction … it is "Block login to Office" (SigninOptions) https://gpsearch.azurewebsites.net/#9351

Which is not really necessary in my contract, but MS has certainly fiddled around with the licenses and the way of activation … I see that Word/Excel etc are logged in with the online account, which was not the case before or was not necessary.

The question: Have any of you encountered these issues in the past few days? If so, is there an explanation or solution?