14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has quietly pulled three Outlook patches that reportedly caused issues with the email client, and now the company promises that a fix would be delivered at a later time, though no specifics were provided.
Specifically, users started complaining about issues with KB4011042, KB3191849, and KB3213654 in late June when they discovered that Outlook 2010, 2013, and 2016, respectively, were crashing after installing the patches.
The updates were supposed to address issues experienced with attachments that had ellipsis or an exclamation mark in their file names, but instead led to unexpected crashes when an email with an attachment was clicked. The KB page of each of the three updates now displays a small notice that informs about the company’s decision to pull them.
“Update 4011042 for Microsoft Outlook 2010 that was released on July 5, 2017, is not currently available. This article will be updated as soon as the update is available again,” it reads.
Remove the updates
More information was provided by Microsoft in a reddit discussion, where the company confirmed that the updates caused a crash impacting the latest 3 versions of the Outlook client.
“A new update for 32-bit Outlook 2010 is under development and will be posted in this article when it becomes available. The original download package for the 32-bit version was removed from the Download Center after a problem was discovered that could cause Outlook to crash when you preview messages that have attachments. If you already downloaded and installed the 32-bit update, we recommend that you remove it until a new version is available,” Microsoft says.
Users are thus recommended to remove the update as soon as possible, though it’s worth mentioning that the whole thing needs to be performed manually, as the company does not provide an automatic patch removal tool.
The crashes are being experienced on all versions of Windows, including Windows 7, 8.1, and 10, in either x86 or x64 editions.