Forum Discussion
Office 365 apps are closing randomly on MacOS
Hi,
is anyone currently experiencing issues with all MS Office 365 apps (Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, Word) in the way that they close all at once, randomly, and you are probably losing work due to the unexpected shutdown.
I got a new MacBook Pro with M3 Max with Sonoma 14.5 recently, and after using it for a few hours, it seems that sporadically, all O365 apps mentioned above that are open at the moment are closing all at once, randomly, without any error message, without any prior notice or any user interaction. ALL other applications except Office are working fine, also OneDrive and MS Teams stay open without any issues. After using the MacBook for a few days, it seems that it's maybe more likely to happen when the Mac is going to standby / lid closed and is woken up afterwards?
Steps I already tried without any change of the behavior, each also including a complete reboot of the machine, in the following order.
- Updating Office with the MS AutoUpdater application
- Simple uninstall of MS Office applications
- Reinstallation by using a clean new O365 download
- Manual uninstallation using https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/uninstall-office-for-mac-eefa1199-5b58-43af-8a3d-b73dc1a8cae3
- Clean reinstallation after complete manual uninstallation
- After uninstalling again, I tried to install it manually with deselection of the MS Defender which is included in the O365 installer package (Defender is already installed by default on the Mac).
- Renaming the MacBooks hostname from XXX-MBP-ABC123DEF to XXXMBPABC123DEF and renaming the SSD name from Macintosh HD to MacintoshHD.
- Complete wipe of the MacBook with my IT department and reinstall / setup of the machine, followed by starting auto updater and updating everything to the latest version.
None of these steps is working, and Office keeps shutting down / crashing without any prior notice at random times, most likely after a sleep. It is enough to just open up some office applications and leave the Mac alone, after return you will find the Mac with all office applications closed (except Teams and Onedrive as mentioned above).
Furthermore, I already set the network availability during sleep within my energy saving settings:
- Wake for network access from "Only on Power adapter" to "Always"
Does anyone have any further ideas for analysis or a solution?
On my private MBP with M1 Pro and Sonoma 14.5 there are no issues at all.
Thank you!!!
Michael1240, the fix is done by there side on the back end of Intune since it is Intune that is causing the issue with the Microsoft 365 apps for MacOS package. I changed my assignment on that from Required to Available for Enrolled Devices and it stopped everything from crashing. I will put it back once it is confirmed it is resolved. Now in my portal it is showing my machine, another machine I enrolled, and 2 other machines that are showing pending Install status and it was not like that yesterday afternoon when I made the change. They were all showing as installed. I hope they fix this, but it won't be done until 2PM EST today. Fingers are crossed
Did anyone ever get a solution for this? Have a MacBook Pro (14 inch M3 Nov 2023) with OS 15.1.1 that had Microsoft 365 for MacOS set to required install in Intune so it would be there when someone logged into their system new at a remote location and started doing this on November 25th and says under Managed Apps that the Microsoft 365 Apps for MacOS is waiting for install status. Going into it, it says pending install since the 25th. I moved it to offered instead of required in Intune to see if that would change things. They think this happened after an OS update on Monday possibly.
I sometimes have issues with certain software on my Mac too, and I don’t get why they randomly freeze or crash. Maybe it’s too much load on the CPU? Though I’m not really using any heavy-duty software. Another problem I’ve run into is organizing files. I like everything to be neat and tidy, but it’s tough to keep things under control with photos and videos, especially when there are tons of duplicates or similar files. There are tools out there now https://setapp.com/app-reviews/best-duplicate-finders to save you from manually deleting duplicates and help organize files on your iPhone quickly. I should probably look into it since I’ve already found what I need.
- Teams is shutting down on our Macs, so far we haven't noticed it with other office apps. However our Macs are not Intune enrolled, we are using an MDM called Mosyle.
is anyone else having issues with sharing screens on 1:1 video calls or in teams meetings?
participants just see grey/white screen, and then teams crashes.
s
- It happened just once for me...
Michael1240 Microsoft will roll out a fix tomorrow via Intune.
- I'm seeing the same issues for about 15 out ~ 200 devices. For the time being, the users are going throw OWA.
gc_root since this was only affecting a small portion of my machines I removed Office apps from being pushed to those devices by excluding them from the policy and manually installed the office suite. This has been working fine for now don’t ask me why since it’s the exact same version of the office apps but the users have had 0 issues all week.
- I have noticed an alert in my Microsoft Office Admin Centre stating there is a known issue with all Microsoft 365 Apps and Teams randomly closing and Intune is doing this for a forced reinstall. This function is happening in the background, and does not matter if your device is pending install or fully installed according to Intune. It says at 2PM they have deployed a fix. I can say since 2:30PM my apps have not been auto closing and no users are telling me that they have closed randomly and that they have had to reopen them.
- Has anyone reached out to MS to tell them about the InTune issue? This gets really annoying...I was in the middle of a presentation sharing my screen and PowerPoint just disappeared, as well as my word doc where I was capturing notes...you literally have to save every 1 minute otherwise you lose work
ZiluminatiYes, but I don't expect much from it.
- Hello,
Apparently I found out, due to previous Microsoft documentation, that Microsoft Office pack 16.86 is not at fault here. The fault is Microsoft Intune deployment system which is super buggy. If you deploy either a stand alone MS application package, or "Microsoft 365 Apps for macOS" and set the user groups or devices to required, it will keep reinstalling these apps because it can not get the OK status from the system. To avoid this, remove these groups from the installation package, bulk sync the Macs and then restart them, the problem should disappear. It worked for me, hopefully it will work for you as well!
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/mem/intune/app-management/no-notification-microsoft365-apps-macos-reinstallAJMACHonestly, I do not think that this is the solution here, as there are a) multiple people / organisations with the problem and systems showing "OK" status in intune, and b) the problem description in your link states that office apps are closing and automatically restarting, which is not the case here. Plus, c) the app installation date is not updating opposing to what the source of your link says.
My MS applications status of today - they have not been updated/installed but still I experience unexpected shutdowns (less than before since I started using Outlook and OneNote web apps via browser), but still had a crash of PowerPoint & Excel this morning.
- So it's an Intune issue? If I remove Intune, nothing will work, right?
By the way, just to follow-up from yesterday, I tried using the Outlook Web App and the Excel, PowerPoint, Word applications and everything still closed...
AJMACagrrrrrrrrrrr I HATE Intune so much!! It's so buggy. I have exactly the same issue. And indeed, in Intune, we see an "Install Pending" status.
Both are Microsoft products—how hard is it to fix this problem!? It looks like this has been a known issue since May 2023. It's strange that I started seeing this problem only a few days ago, never before, to be honest.
- Trust me, I feel you and s much as I would like to make the enrollment experience fully automated, I guess we will just have to stick with uploading the office pack to company portal and make it a self service option.
- Same issue here. macOS 14.5 / latest Microsoft Office 365 version / Defender / Intune MDM-managed device
- This is definitely gathering pace! We've been running the previous version of Office on the affected machines for a number of days now without incident. Yes this is a work around and security are blowing chunks but the users are happy and the business is functioning.
- I have been flipping as I have moved one machine back to May 2024 update and the Security Centre for Microsoft is sending me e-mails daily to update the machine and turn back on MUA. I just don't understand why Microsoft is not seeing this? Are other organizations holding back on updates and this is why they are not complaining. They actually told me this morning that there is a known issue with Outlook Exchange closing Outlook but it not affecting everyone. That does not explain the other MS 365 apps closing at the same time as well. I find if I have Outlook closed and Word/Excel/Powerpoint open that everything is fine. As soon as I use the Outlook App, then is when they all crash. Makes we wonder if the Outlook app is the culprit. I have gone back to the Outlook Web and have seen an issue on my machine for almost an hour.
- I have a ticket open with Microsoft and they are working with their Engineers as my whole organization is having this issue with Apple Silicon Macs and now I am seeing on a test X86 AMD Ryzen 7 Windows machine now that is not enrolled into Intune. I am seeing it with a test M1 Mac Mini base model, not enrolled into Intune as well. I did send back a scathing e-mail to support because this is getting out of hand. I am even run scans with different EDR tools and there is no malware doing this. I am at a lost as this makes no sense at all, how a SaaS provider can have this many problems with there software and they don't seem to be testing it inhouse with their softwar engineers.
