Microsoft rolled out a fix for an issue that causes random “Product deactivated” errors for customers using Microsoft 365 Office apps.
User reports on Microsoft’s community website, Reddit, and other online platforms show that affected users receive “Product deactivated” warnings in Office apps. The errors are caused by license changes initiated by administrators. Techzine previously wrote about this bug.
The problem occurs when switching subscriptions from Office 365 E3 to Microsoft 365 E3. Or when moving users between license groups. Such as Azure Active Directory or synchronized local security groups.
The error also occurs when administrators adjust license or service plan settings or delete and re-add users to license groups. Or when they enable or disable the “Latest Version of Desktop Apps” service plan under the Microsoft 365 subscription.
This week, Microsoft reported that it fixed the bug that caused these deactivation warnings. “The engineering team rolled out a patch on the service side to resolve unexpected product deactivations.” The company stated this in an updated support document.
Temporary fixes
Microsoft offers several temporary fixes for affected customers who have not yet received the patch. Those can click on the “Reactivate” button in the error banner. To then log in when prompted. Alternatively, they can log out of all Microsoft 365 apps, close them, restart them and then log in again to resolve the deactivation issue.
If the errors persist, users are advised to ask their administrators to check the Microsoft 365 subscription management portal to see if their subscription has expired.
For further troubleshooting, Microsoft asks users to provide support engineers with the logs stored in the %temp%/diagnostics folder.
Multiple bugs fixed
In recent months, Microsoft also shared a temporary fix for an issue with Microsoft 365 in which classic Outlook would hang or crash when copying text. The company also fixed another bug that caused Microsoft 365 apps (such as Outlook, Word, Excel, and OneNote) to crash when typing text or running a spell checker.