Access Broken today 10th May 2022

Anonymous
2022-05-10T19:32:07+00:00

I had a call from one of my users today to say his database was just closing down as he clicked a button.

I got his front and back end files and ran them on a PC with Office 2010, they worked fine, but his Office 365 has been updated today and he has the problem on all his PC's.

I tried the front/backend files on two PC's I have that are running Office 365 and they too have the same issue.

It seems like Microsoft has broken things.

Is anyone else having issues after today's update?

Regards, Dennis

UPDATE: This mentions that the recent Office 365 update fixes problems in Excel, Outlook and Word, what it does not mention is that it broke Access! https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-365-apps-build-1512820224-resolves-issues-with-excel-outlook-and-word/

UPDATE 2:

I managed to program around the main issue I was having, however I have just seen messages to say Microsoft have fixed it, I just tried the original database and it seems to be working fine. Thanks to everyone who posted their experiences here, it was very helpful.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Access | Other | Other

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  1. Tom van Stiphout 40,216 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2022-05-12T13:59:05+00:00

    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.

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-05-12T08:47:49+00:00

    Tom,

    It is clear that Microsoft have the ability to remotely control the behaviour of Microsoft Access without the need for users to upgrade their version/build of Office or Windows.

    It is clear that this ability can have a worldwide effect on the behaviour of Microsoft Access within one hour.

    It is clear that Microsoft Access does not even need to be restarted to respond to this control.

    This could only be achieved through some form of communication between Microsoft Access and Microsoft’s servers via the internet.

    The only known channel for such a communication is though the product activation/licencing features of Microsoft 365.

    The recent problematic behaviour of Microsoft Access shows the symptoms of it running in some sort of debugging mode.

    • As a form closed it would show a variety of error messages (e.g. No Current Record, Property Not Found etc)
    • These error messages were not exposed to or controlled by the VBA project running the application code
    • The occurrence of a message and it’s content depends upon the previous behaviour of the closing form (e.g. manipulation of recordsets by underlying code)
    • Under certain circumstances, the behaviour causes Access to crash

    Is the product activation procedure activating/deactivating this special debugging mode?

    What can we as developers do to ensure that if/when it happens again, our applications are only subjected to the benign error messages and not the catastrophic system crashes?

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-05-12T07:48:05+00:00

    Tom,

    Please can you explain how Microsoft have applied a worldwide fix which was effective within one hour without rolling out a new version of Office or Windows.

    Kind regards

    Neil

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  4. Tom van Stiphout 40,216 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2022-05-11T21:05:00+00:00

    The version number did not change.

    The fix is now in effect worldwide.

    Reboot those machines for good measure. Any issues after that have a different root cause.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-05-11T21:04:46+00:00

    I have a test laptop here where the problem resolved automatically. I also have a virtual machine running where the problem still exists, even after updating office with this afternoon's update.

    It's such a strange situation!

    EDIT: 1 hour later, the virtual machine is working without errors now.

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