Microsoft has confirmed a bug in Outlook Classic that can cause the processor to load up by 30-50% while typing. The worst part is that the first complaints about this appeared in November last year, and there is still no full-fledged solution. The company currently offers only a temporary solution.
Although it’s been about six months since the problem was discovered, it’s only now that Microsoft has officially acknowledged the issue in Outlook Classic. The bug causes an increased load on the processor, noticeable freezes and even freezes of the program when writing emails. According to the company, CPU utilization can increase by up to 30-50%, which is noticeable, especially on older computers.
Developers were able to reproduce this bug after updating to Microsoft 365 Apps Version 2406 Build 17726.20126+, which appeared in June 2024 on the Current, Monthly Enterprise, and Insider channels. There is currently no final fix, so the company recommends switching to the Semi-Annual update channel, where this issue does not appear.
For organizations, Microsoft offers detailed instructions on how to change the update channel using Group Policies, Office Deployment Tool, Microsoft Configuration Manager, Intune, etc. Home users can simply make changes to the system registry:
Users have tried various methods to solve the problem: turning off hardware graphics acceleration, automatic spell checking, and extensions — but to no avail. One user even reported that the temperature of his powerful Core i9-14900HX processor reached 95°C just by opening a New Message window.
As the Outlook team is still investigating the issue, the proposed solution is — temporary. The bug seems to be related to the way Outlook handles text fields. But it’s strange how such an obvious problem could have escaped the attention of the developers.
Source: tomshardware