You will be starting Outlook in Safe Mode.

Or, hold the Ctrl key down and click on the Outlook icon on your task bar. What to do when Outlook is stuck on “Processing” If you’re lucky, you will call your calm and professional IT consultant and he will sigh and say, I know this one. If you’re lucky, you will call your calm and professional IT consultant and he’ll answer the phone instead of being off on a trip to Alta for the first sunny days of skiing after a month of solid snow, finding powder and cutting fresh tracks through the trees and making excited whooping noises. Nothing will make Outlook get past the “processing” screen. You can close the window by clicking the X and restart it and it will do the same thing. The next time Outlook is started, the splash screen appears, add-ins are loaded, and the window says “Processing.”Īnd that’s where it stops. The Office updates are unpredictable, completely untethered from any day of the week, and we are given no warning when they are going to be installed. I’ve probably run into it 15 or 20 times in the last six months, including some people who have experienced it more than once.Īs near as I can tell, it happens to people who have Office 2016, licensed through a business Office 365 subscription. I can find no pattern to explain when it appears. It only affects a few people, but those people have no good way to discover how to fix it. It is pointless and stupid and represents Microsoft carelessness at its worst. Let me tell you about an infuriating bug.

Outlook will only open in safe mode