Rules and Alerts failed in various ways

Hi! I want to edit my rules in the outlook but I keep having different behaviors when I want to in the software. Sometimes, it will say "The attempt to connect to the Microsoft Exchange Failed" although the status on the main window showed "Connected to Microsoft Exchange"; sometimes I got connected and open the window of rules and alerts, but which ever button I clicked will shut the Outlook or if I was luckily sometimes, gave me a reboot of outlook. Due to these, my changes to the rules were never saved. This is really frustrating and could someone provide some suggestion on what is causing this issue? Thanks!