Patch Tuesday Kills Outlook

On July 14th, 2020 Microsoft pushed their monthly bundle of operating system and application patches.  Unfortunately, this one disabled Microsoft Outlook.  Many users woke up today to find their Outlook won’t start.  It gives an error, usually that a previous run did not go well and it suggests starting in Safe Mode to troubleshoot the issue.

While there is no fix published yet, there is a workaround: you can roll back the update to a previous version of Outlook.  Here is how:

1. Open a command prompt: Click on the Start Menu and type “cmd”. When the “Command Prompt” result appears, click on it.
2. In the command prompt type:

   cd "\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun"

   then press Enter.

3. You will now be in the ClickToRun folder. Type:

   officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.12827.20470

   then press Enter.

The computer will roll Outlook back to a version which doesn’t have this problem.  You should now be able to run Outlook like normal.

Good luck, and let us know in the comments if this works for you!