Access Broken today 10th May 2022

Gina,

You misunderstood me. I was not suggesting that the forum was being tight lipped about the problem.

On the contrary, the forum has responded extremely well to the specific problem and I think it is marvellous that Tom came to us to announce the fix within two days of the first problems being encountered.

In fact, this is the forum for this sort of issue. Microsoft Access is not supported by the Microsoft 365 Support team. They do not have the expertise or resources to deal with Access issues that can't be solved by its online help system. If you raise a support ticket for Access through your Microsoft 365 subscription, once they have gone through the reboot and upgrade routines, they will refer you here. In fact, they cannot even escalate support issues to the Access dev team - they do not have the lines of communication in place to do so.

This forum is monitored by excellent MVPs who have a direct line to the Access dev team. So once it has been determined that there is a real problem with Access itself, they act as a conduit to get something done about it, quickly and effectively. They also keep us up to date with progress as the fix is developed and rolled out.

This is exactly what Tom has done in this case and his actions are beyond criticism.

What I am referring to as "the big secret" is the mechanism that Microsoft are using to interact in near real-time with our computers to control the behaviour of Microsoft Office without our knowledge or involvement. I was not aware of this mechanism and can find very little information which describes or explains it.

I assume that their paranoia about coming clean and openly discussing the mechanism is because this sounds so sinister. Is it a fiendish violation of our privacy that they need to keep secret? Perhaps if it had been a surreptitious secondary use of the activation/licencing mechanism it would be. But phoning home to check the status/quality of previously installed updates is a perfectly legitimate, sensible and welcome extension of the Office Update mechanism. Assuming that it is controlled by the option to opt-in to automatic updates and that the connections are not being tracked for other purposes, there are no privacy issues to be shy about.

The consequences of "bad patches" are widespread and severe. This FeatureGate function is a welcome tool which helps to mitigate the consequences when they inevitably occur. I am calling for more openness and information about this aspect of the Office Update mechanism. This will allow us to make more effective decisions when dealing with these issues and allow us to contribute to help Microsoft to solve the issues more efficiently.

Well said, Gina. The main reason many of us looked at the possibility of a Windows Update being at the root of the problem was that it appeared shortly after the second Tuesday, Patch Tuesday for Microsoft, coupled with the recent litany of bugs in Office and Windows Updates. That said, the variety of symptoms reported seemed not to follow a specific pattern, which pointed in the opposite direction, or directions.

Although it is painful, truly no one is sitting on their hands when this stuff happens.

Former MVP here...

When the issue first occurred and having only heard from one Client I thought corruption. I went thru every step I could think of and realized, nope, not corruption. I then went to my old *friend* Google and still found nothing. I started asking around, nope, no one was experiencing this. I decided to take a break and come to this forum and take a break. And when I saw this post, I was thrilled (well not at the issue) I was not alone and posted. You can see my post on page one.

I, among others, were trying to track down what was causing the issue. (I was up until 4:30 AM.) Especially as, at that time, there were few reports, I could count them on one hand. By the 11th a potential workaround was found and even that was posted.

I am saying this to say, no one was being tight lipped. It took a bit to figure out it was not Access. Why? The update that came out did not, and I repeat did not, have any updates that applied to Access. So, initially, the update was ignored. Believe me when I say, we feel your pain.

Thank you Tom.

I had found out as much here: https://nolongerset.com/bug-alert-no-current-record/

So Office is phoning home to see if any previously released updates have been blacklisted for causing problems and switching them off at a granular level.

As a developer, that seems to be a perfectly sensible and legitimate thing to do. We have all released rogue updates from time to time that we have needed to pull as a matter of emergency.

I assume that in this case, a FeatureGate flag associated with the latest Patch Tuesday update has inadvertently upset some dependent code which was already present from some earlier build(s). That would explain why the problem coincided with the latest release but hit existing earlier builds which had not been patched for days.

So why the big secret? If you Google your horse’s mouth, you don’t find many horses!

The awareness of this feature of Office Updates is slowly creeping out into the public domain. We as a community need more transparency so that we can help sort out the mess when things go wrong and work to minimise the impact on our clients.

I know you MVPs are tightly bound by your NDA, but it is important that the horse’s mouth starts to talk a lot more about this feature so that we can embrace it and make it work for us instead of against us.

From the horse's mouth:

When we ship changes we always try to wrap them in something called a ChangeGate or FeatureGate. This is how we can contain the impact on any change on customers as soon as possible if it breaks something unexpected. Basically when an office app loads it requests statuses of these gates from the network, to determine if the code its wrapping should execute or not. That way if the new code causes a regression, we can change a setting on a service on our side and when a user restarts the app the issue should be resolved.  This is how we can contain the impact on any change on customers as soon as possible.