[German]Microsoft has addressed the problem that Outlook from Microsoft 365 takes a very long time to start and then sometimes hangs completely (freeze bug). If the application is closed and restarted, Outlook is opened directly. According to an announcement, the problem, which has been known since June 2023, has now been identified and fixed. The fix has already been published in the beta channel and will be rolled out in November 2023 via a Microsoft 365 update in the current channel.
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The Outlook 365 startup and freeze problem
On June 6, 2023, German reader Matthias had left this comment asking if there were problems with Outlook. His Outlook hangs during certain operations, and in this support post from June 19, 2023, Microsoft confirmed that there were problems with Outlook because it can hang at startup. It states:
Sometimes Outlook seems to synchronize the entire OST file on all or most startup operations. Outlook gets stuck at the startup screen for a long time before finally opening and working normally.
Examining the profile and OST file names shows that no new OST files are created (this would also appear in the application event logs if this were the cause).
Affected people often report that Outlook opens without delay when they cancel the opening and try again. They also note that Outlook sometimes refuses to start at all when they have switched to airplane mode, causing this error. I had previously reported this issue and symptoms in the June 2023 blog post Microsoft 365: Microsoft shares a workaround for hanging/slow running Outlook.
This problem occurs because Outlook has trouble determining the "default" state of the cache, with Outlook and non-Office MAPI applications like MFCMAPI coming up with different results. At the time, Microsoft had proposed a workaround, which is described in the blog post.
Microsoft has developed a fix
The colleagues at Bleeping Computer have noticed that Microsoft has updated on October 16, 2023 the above-mentioned support post Outlook starts up slowly and hangs at splash screen when REST to MAPI is unexpectedly toggled. There it says that the problem was initially fixed in build 16929.15000. This build has already been published in the beta channel.
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The fix will be pushed to the Current Channel in late November in builds 17029.20000 and above. Microsoft recommends monitoring the update history for Microsoft 365 Updates to see when this build moves to the Current Channel, Update History for Microsoft 365 Apps (listed by date).
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