Numerous Microsoft services are experiencing problems early on Wednesday, with thousands of people complaining about the issues on social media.
According to Downdetector(Opens in a new window), Xbox Live, Microsoft Store, Outlook.com(Opens in a new window), Microsoft 365, Azure, Teams, and several popular games, including Minecraft and Destiny, have been experiencing outages in the past 24 hours. (Editor’s note: Downdetector is owned by Mashable’s parent company, Ziff Davis).
Microsoft is rolling out subtle changes to Office 365 to make work a little easier for its millions of customers.
The cluttered control bar (Microsoft calls it a ribbon) on the top of web-version of Word has been slimmed down to just one line. The same new bar will appear in Outlook next month.
Microsoft is holding off on slimming down PowerPoint, Excel and other Office 365 apps until it can do more research. It’s walking a fine line between offering simplicity to casual customers and angering power users.
Microsoft today is rolling out a new tool for business owners using Office 365 and Outlook called Customer Service Manager, a lightweight CRM for companies that need to track their customer interactions and history, but aren’t yet ready for a more robust platform like Dynamics 365. The new tool lets businesses track tasks and deals in progress directly in Outlook, and will pop-up reminders aimed at helping them stay on top of their customer relationships, the company says.
Once enabled, Outlook Customer Manager will automatically organize customer information, including emails, meetings, calls, notes, files, tasks, deals and deadlines. This information – which is collected from email, calendar and call log data – is presented in a timeline format next to the inbox.
After dealing with non-stop crashes of my Outlook account, I found this posting. Disable Update patch KB3097877 and your Outlook will work just fine again.
Per subject, was finding that specific e-mail were consistently causing Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 to crash. They were always HTML messages, typically the sort of “on sale” e-mail you get from distributors etc that include a lot of tables, images etc.
I started by removing the IE11 cumulative update but that didn’t resolve the crashes. I then removed KB3097877 & KB3101746 and I’ve not been able to reproduce the crashes on 2 PC’s since.
“This security update resolves vulnerabilities in Windows. The most severe of the vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if an attacker convinces a user to open a specially crafted document or to go to an untrusted webpage that contains embedded fonts.”
The patches were only release 10~ hours ago
Dispatches From The Front 