[German]There was a problem with the activation of Microsoft 365 apps. Users are noticing since months that the (Office) apps from are subscription are spontaneously deactivated and can then no longer be used. Microsoft has published a support article about this and wrote that they investigating the issue. On December 20, 2024 they announced, that they rolled out a fix.
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Reports on Reddit and MS Answers
As early as September 14, 2024, a user reported in the US Microsoft Answers forum in the post School license deactivation warning. A government employee from Turkey complained that the Office 365 packages licensed for the IT department of the Turkish Ministry of Education had been deactivated on the 26 smartboards in the respective classrooms. The poster assumes that this could affect all schools in Turkey and asks whether it is necessary to switch to LibreOffice. The post has since been blocked for comments.
On the reddit.com platform, an affected person posted the above screenshot in April 2024 and asked what was wrong with his account in the post What is wrong with my account? The screenshot shows that he is receiving an error because the Microsoft 365 product has been deactivated. He can no longer use any of his Office modules.
He had tried the Support and Recovery Assistant (SaRA) provided by Microsoft without success. In this post, the affected person also writes that SaRA probably did not help. A Microsoft moderator gives some more tips on what he can do. I reported on this topic in my German blog post Microsoft 365: Apps werden spontan deaktiviert.
Microsoft confirmed and fixed the issue
On December 19, 2024, Microsoft published the support article Users might receive a Product Deactivated error in Microsoft 365 Office apps, in which the deactivation of Microsoft 365 is confirmed for individual users. The posts above passed me by, but tje other day I came across the following tweet.
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The colleagues from Bleeping Computer have compiled details in the article Microsoft 365 users hit by random product deactivation errors. Microsoft writes that any change made by the administrator at the licensing level can trigger the problem. Microsoft describes a number of reasons that can cause this problem.
The Reactivate button in the banner shown should provide a remedy. Or all Microsoft 365 applications, including Outlook, must be closed. The Microsoft 365 application should then be restarted and the user should log in again. Microsoft is currently analyzing the problem.
On December 20, 2024 Microsoft updated the support article and wrote: "The engineering team has deployed a patch on the service side to resolve unexpected product deactivations."
So a server-side bug fix has been implemented to prevent the deactivation of subscriptions. I covered it on Dec. 23, 2024 within my German blog post Microsoft 365: Fix für deaktivierte (Office-) Apps (20. Dez. 2024). Has anyone been affected by this problem? Can the fix be confirmed? Thanks to the user for the tip.
Es wurde also eine serverseitige Fehlerbehebung durchgeführt, die die Deaktivierung der Abonnements verhindern soll. War jemand von diesem Problem betroffen? Lässt sich der Fix bestätigen? Danke an den Nutzer für den Hinweis.
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