Office 2016 Licensing Service Not Available

If I had a nickel for every bug that Microsoft has introduced into my event viewer, I could retire.

Yes, we should ignore it, but that's after everyone has wasted a lot of time and effort chasing it down. Not our job, and I'm a little tired of dealing with issues like it.

P.S. to Microsoft staff: I'm also tired of useless, uninformed instructions from "Support Engineers." If you don't have a real solution, say so. Don't further waste our time with blanket, vanilla "troubleshooting" that does absolutely nothing to fix what's broken. Stop it now.

Ignoring people who "cry wolf" is dangerous because you wind up ignoring real problems as well.

I've located the subscription check scheduled task under Task Scheduler -> Task Scheduler Library  -> Microsoft -> Office -> Office Subscription Maintenance, set to run at 6.06 AM every day.

Right click, disable.

It still doesn't work, but at least now it's not a decoy hiding real problems.

-- Ken

We had the same issue with skype for business that refused to connect to internet.  In fact we found the root cause : it was blockey by our new proxy.  The message in the event viewer was exactly the same.

Subscription licensing service failed: -1073418220

When you open your session, office checks the office online license AND windows license. (Thanks Microsoft.... even if you're genuine...) 

I came to this conclusion by checking the event id error code and conducted a test into a lab.

Here's the code :

-1073418220 (Error code 0xC004F014) = Invalid license (Windows not genuine)

With the new proxy, i checked the windows genuine validation test, and it failed.  I removed the proxy settings, the test succeeded.

So i tested to restart the station encountering this issue without the proxy setting and guess what's back?  Skype for business and office tools.  And the event viewer is now free of this message.

So to overcome it, I now allow all traffic from the domain microsoft.com and the license issue isn't appearing again.

So check the firewall, check your proxy because obviously, Microsoft do want to know if your licenses are up to date at anytime.  Your proxy is maybe tailored to allow Office365 domains and apps but it needs also to allow other traffic to Microsoft for license checking...... .  If you're note genuine, you know what to do -> regularize your situation :)

Kind regards,

Benjamin D'Haeyer

If the service existed in the first place, there might be an event log to fix. But ain't nothin there. :(

I suspect the issue is related to

HOWTO: Troubleshooting the "Event Message Not Found" Message

Basically the Event Source "Office 2016 Licencing Service" is not registered under 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog\

typically found within the subkey Application.

Have this exact same issue and the first step in that link tells you to check the location for a registered Event Source, have checked and it is not there.

When Microsoft won't recognize or fix something they call it ''By design'' That means it's not a priority because it's just an irritation not a problem that can cause failure to software.

For some it's designed to get you peeved at MS. It's like buying a car and the fill windshield washer light stays on and the car dealer says it's made like that by ''design''. Won't that just tickle you pink? :)