Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Outlook is crashing worldwide with 0xc0000005 errors

bleepingcomputer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 109 posts

Re: Microsoft Outlook is crashing worldwide with 0xc0000005 errors

#61

Post by sabarn01 »

tjalfi wrote: post #42
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this has only really been the case since about 2015, so instead of ascribing it to a "jack of all trades" philosophy I believe it can be more readily explained by a "lets hire a bunch of webdevs to work on our desktop OS" philosophy.

They laid off thousands of testers in 2014[0]. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that quality plummeted afterwards. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-m...

Most were moved to dev. The difference is Dev are responsible for writing tests now which was not true prior.

Re: Microsoft Outlook is crashing worldwide with 0xc0000005 errors

#62

Post by Spooky23 »

marricks wrote: post #14

I wonder if large companies get more of a pass with outages then small ones? Bias towards authority in a way. If a service has a big enough base an outage could almost seem like a pass for everyone. “Oo couldn’t do that this morning GITHUB was down.” Whereas if my small GitLab server was down bosses could be “well why aren’t we on GitHub like everyone else, it’s up now?” When google calendar was down a bit ago I trie…

Most of the customers are too dumb to really care, and if they did, what would they do

It will take you 3 years to unwind your Microsoft business. Few people with that level of rage over poor Windows/Office software can maintain it that long. Normally, companies yell at the IT Staff, unless it's a really bad problem, then they yell at the TAM or account manager, who takes some abuse, wears an appropriate sad/chastened face, and talks about the Microsoft release ring framework, and that most problems are your fault because you don't follow a similar model.

In my experience recently with O365, these issues usually are an update issue related to some regression in Windows 10 combined with an Office issue, or changes to Microsoft's authentication infrastructure. Microsoft has a unique understanding and methodology for making things good enough to persist -- they don't need to sell the product anymore, just make it not suck too much.

The first issue is because no human can keep a product working that has like 50 different active releases while the company prioritizes pushing out slop. The second issue is usually tied to a product release or revision, combined with new infrastructure. (Especially if it's in new IP space)

Re: Microsoft Outlook is crashing worldwide with 0xc0000005 errors

#63

Post by EvanAnderson »

This is probably a good time to ask: Are any of you receiving your checks from Microsoft for all the beta (and, apparently alpha) testing that you're doing? Mine aren't showing up. I'm not sure who to contact about it. /s

In the calls that I've gotten my tiny little Customer base has had something like 25 people "down" today. At least ActiveSync on phones and OWA were still working. I know some people were miffed that full-blown Outlook was unusable because it's a major part of their workflow.

How did this get past QA? It's simply mind-blowing...

Re: Microsoft Outlook is crashing worldwide with 0xc0000005 errors

#64

Post by kbenson »

_jal wrote: post #54
pmontra wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Changing from Gmail isn't easy because of all the other services and logins associated with it. You can keep the Gmail account and start using a new one somewhere else. You start registering to new services with your new account and gradually migrate old services to it if they let you. You end up with gmail for social logins (which hopefully you can migrate too) and little else. I do have a Gmail account. I use it…

> You start registering to new services with your new account and gradually migrate old services Try doing this with with thousands of employees with multiple devices and varying computer skills, at the same time, while keeping a business running. Don't forget to factor in multiple 2FA systems, that you also have more service accounts than you probably think, and that your spam filters will change behaviors (for that…

Congratulations, you've identified a market need. If someone builds a tool to do all this (if the market isn't saturated with them already), companies will pay for it. There's plenty of tools to convert to/from Microsoft Active Directory deployments or varying quality, I don't see why Google should be any different.

Re: Microsoft Outlook is crashing worldwide with 0xc0000005 errors

#65

Post by techntoke »

stkai wrote: post #12

If you're on Office 365, the Outlook web client is great ( https://outlook.office.com ). In fact, I haven't used the full client since 2015, except for rare cases. Or, you can enjoy the quiet while email is down :)

Except email labels (aka search folders) are severely limited

Re: Microsoft Outlook is crashing worldwide with 0xc0000005 errors

#67

Post by bArray »

marricks wrote: post #14

I wonder if large companies get more of a pass with outages then small ones? Bias towards authority in a way. If a service has a big enough base an outage could almost seem like a pass for everyone. “Oo couldn’t do that this morning GITHUB was down.” Whereas if my small GitLab server was down bosses could be “well why aren’t we on GitHub like everyone else, it’s up now?” When google calendar was down a bit ago I trie…

> Bias towards authority in a way.

I think it's more "momentum". With a smaller company that affects a small number of users, the possibility of cutting your losses is quite feasible. On the other hand, with Outlook you've got your whole org using it, your servers running on it, your customers integrated with it, custom rules setup - a cut and run is just not simple.

Honestly though, I really don't get why rollback isn't more common for these larger pieces of software. Just some logic to detect multiple crashes, check if a rollback would break anything (i.e. dependencies) and then rollback. If you remove so much power from the average user in your OS, you ought to really have some amazing automated procedure for these scenarios.

I thought they also do limited roll-out as well? I think I remember the Windows anniversary bricked a bunch of machines in the limited roll-out and they just pushed it out anyway?

The complete lack of control as to when an update is performed is astounding - I know there are some settings to stop this, but apparently there are cases where that setting reverts back to auto or you need to switch it back on in order to manually update. I remember the last straw for MS and myself was accidentally clicking update just before a meeting whilst on very low battery, with no way to back out and no charger on hand. It didn't end well.

These days if something is "Windows only", it goes in a VM along with other software I don't trust.

Re: Microsoft Outlook is crashing worldwide with 0xc0000005 errors

#68

Post by boramalper »

16bytes wrote: post #59

I still don't understand why Microsoft doesn't print human readable error code instead of just "0xc0000005". To figure out what the actual message is, you first have to figure out if you are seeing a HRESULT or a NTSTATUS[1]. In this case the leading 0xC is an invalid HRESULT, so it's for sure an NTSTATUS. Then you just look up the code in the bottom two bytes [2]. In this case it's just error code 5: "STATUS_ACCESS_…

I really enjoyed reading this, thanks!

> In this case it's just error code 5: "STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION", which is a memory access error, which typically means it's a bug where the program accidentally is trying to read outside of its memory space.

What would be a (more) user-friendly error message for this though, given the quite technical nature of the error?

Re: Microsoft Outlook is crashing worldwide with 0xc0000005 errors

#70

Post by techntoke »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #23

It's worth noting that this appears solely to be a failure with Office 365/Click-to-Run-based installations. If you buy your software instead of subscribing to it, and service Office with traditional Windows Update mechanisms... everything is fine today. This is what happens when you rip out well-tested IT infrastructure that has a reasonable update distribution process and entrust the cloud to update your software f…

Microsoft switched to no longer providing updated ISOs for Office 2019 and actively pushes Office 365. Plus their package management and update tools for enterprises are riddled with their own issues that makes managing hotfixes and updates a major PIA.
Post reply on HN