Outlook Starts and Immediately Closes

We've received a flood of support calls today regarding Outlook. When you load Outlook, it starts and then closes after five to ten seconds. It appears this is caused by a bad Outlook patch that was recently released. You can roll back to a previous version by issuing the following commands from an Admin Cmd prompt:

1. cd "\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun"
2. officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.12827.20470

DO NOT attempt a repair of Office. The repair will fail and leave all Office programs unusable. Any new installation of Office 365 will fail in the middle of the installation until this issue is resolved. Until this issue is resolved, DO NOT install any Office updates – it will probably break Outlook. We will post updates as they become available.

*** Update *** Microsoft reports that they've fixed the issue and Outlook should automatically update. It may take several hours before the fix progates to every computer. The fix IS NOT related to the Security Patches that were released on 7/15/2020. As a workaround, use Outlook Web App (OWA). If Outlook does not load try to start Outlook every hour for four hours. If you're still having problems after four hours please contact Microsoft.