Microsoft Pulls Office for Mac 2011 SP2 Upgrade

Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 boxMicrosoft withdrew its Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 2 (SP2) update that was released on April 12. Users quickly reported problems running Outlook after they had upgraded and Microsoft acknowledged that Outlook databases had been corrupted for some users.

Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 SP2 was intended to fix critical issues and improve stability and reliability, and addressed everything from Full Screen View support in Lion for PowerPoint to improving printing of PDF faxes from Word. However, it also seems to have corrupted Outlook databases and rendered them unusable, at least for some people.

Six days after the release, Microsoft confirmed there was a problem, according to Computerworld, and offered instructions to help prevent it from happening as well as help in recovering the database for those who had been affected. Three days later, Microsoft took the more drastic step of pulling the update from its automatic upgrade service entirely.

On April 20, an Office for Mac blog post stated, “We have temporarily stopped pushing out the SP2 update through Microsoft AutoUpdate while we investigate the issue. Customers are still able to obtain the SP2 update via the Microsoft Downloads site.”

As of this writing, there is no indication of when the issue might be resolved.

Microsoft has stopped automatic updates in the past, once for Windows XP and once for Windows Vista.

Users can manually download and install the Office for Mac SP2 update if they so choose.