Office 365 apps are closing randomly on MacOS

[Michael1240]

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-b73dc1a8...
• 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!!!

[#2]

@Keaters44 Thanks for this info! Is the fix you are talking about just being deployed by MS in their cloud operation system or anything a local IT guy has to install/update? (I'm speaking as a user who has no access to MS Admin Center nor Intune management.)

If I understand correctly, there are now 2 suggested solutions:

a) Exclude Office 365 App deployment via Intune for the affected Mac clients.

b) Said MS Intune fix to be effective for the environment the affected Mac clients are registered in.

[#3]

At 6:41 AM ET, my apps just closed again...

[#4]

Looking forward to Monday to see if there is a change in the behavior.

[#5]

Is Microsoft InTune in the Apple App store? It's been so long I forgot how InTune was put on my Mac...just wondering HOW the update will come through, or whether I'd see it...

[#6]

@ZiluminatiDont worry about that. Intune is the MS management portal that your IT department is using to manage their assets and where distribution of software to the end users machines is set/registered. Therefore you (as an user) should not need to do anything.

[#7 · Accepted solution]

@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

[#8]

Thanks for the notification. We too saw it yesterday and hope for the fix to be corrected soon.

[#9]

Seems like that Intune fix is working well. I have been able to work with all O365 apps (Excel, Word, OneNote and Outlook) open since this morning, connected via VPN and no issues at all. Still not 100% convinced until I will be at a local office w/o VPN but that has to wait until Friday.
So far, so good!

Thanks everyone who contributed to hunting this down, especially the admins who had contact with MS!!!

[#10]

@Michael1240 Same for us, everything seems to work normal again.

[#11]

it should not make a difference if your are connected via vpn, inside the office or remote without vpn.

[#12]

Does this mean that if we were running from an older version of Microsoft 365 apps, can we have the employees turn back on their automatic updates without fear that things will start crashing again?

[#13]

So far so good here...nothing crashed/closed thus far...

[#14]

@Michael1240 

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

[#15]

It happened just once for me...

[#16]

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.

[#17]

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.