If it’s not one thing it’s another. Following several recent Azure outages and a massive blue screen of death (BSOD) disaster thanks to a rogue third party update, Microsoft is now facing crashes with flagship Office productivity suite.
Earlier today, reports began flowing in of Microsoft Office 365 apps such as Outlook, Word, or OneNote crashing when users attempted various authoring activities among the suite that include spell-checking, copy/paste, and in a lot of instances, simply typing.
Microsoft has acknowledge that its productivity suite is suffering from a bug that was introduced in version 2407 of Office 365 and with builds specifically 17830.20138 or higher.
What the company identifies as an Event 1000 or Event 1001 is bug associated with a language pack being outdated. Users can search C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\ mscss7xx.dll to see if their language pack is out date and they can attempt to perform an repair via the Office 365 support page instructions or a re-install of the language packs
Microsoft has also noted a self test users can implement to see if their apps are affected by today’s bug before digging into their productivity flow only to have the platform crash on them.
You can confirm if this is the issue when by looking at the Windows Event Viewer Application Log for Event 1000 or Event 1001, and the following event details:
Faulting application name: OUTLOOK.EXE, version: 16.0.17830.20138, time stamp: 0x66aaad8c
Faulting module name: mscss7it.dll, version: 16.0.12527.20122, time stamp: 0x5e439ea1 Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000000000003e518
Faulting process id: 0x0x51B0
Faulting application start time: 0x0x1DAE97DD89190C3The faulting module name will vary depending on what language packs you have installed. For example, mscss7it.dll for Italian, or mscss7de.dll, for German, with others listed here, Language identifiers and OptionState ID values in Office 2016.
Microsoft has yet to push out a fix via their own software distribution for now, but it is encouraging users to visit the Repair an Office Applicaiton and Language Accessory Pack for M365 as its current stop-gap solution to avoid crashes.
Perhaps, Microsoft might want to add another pilar of focus for its employees beyond security, and try to aim for a 0-day up-time measure of its most relied on software and services.
