Microsoft has recently identified an issue with an update for Outlook that was issued in early June. This update causes the Outlook software (NOT outlook.com) to fail when searching for messages. You may get incomplete results, or a message stating “something went wrong…” when you try to search for messages. I wrestled with this issue myself, and a few of my clients have as well, so I thought if there was anyone else out there with this issue they may benefit from this information. Here is what a Microsoft representative posted on a forum concerning this issue:
The Windows Team has developed a fix for the bug and it will ship in the Windows Updates 6/27. Although we do not recommend uninstalling a security update removing the one applicable for the version of Windows does mitigate it. It will likely require Windows to be restarted for the indexing to start again. This list of the affected updates below are the ones I know of.
KB4022719 in Windows 7
KB4022726 in Windows 8.1
KB4022715 in Windows 10
KB4022725 in Windows 10
We have also added the issue to this document to track it, https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Outlook-known-issues-in-the-June-2017-security-updates-3f6dbffd-8505-492d-b19f-b3b89369ed9b?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US.
If you do not know how to uninstall an update but want to try on your own, refer to this link for general instructions on how to uninstall a windows update. (the article references a different update number, but just search for the one listed above instead): https://www.ghacks.net/2014/12/11/how-to-remove-installed-windows-updates-and-block-them-afterwards/
Once the update is uninstalled and your computer is rebooted, open outlook. It will be slow at first since the computer is reindexing all of your mail, but let it sit and it will speed up again after an hour or more, depending on how many files and emails you have.
As much as I hate to recommend uninstalling a windows update becasue of the potential security implications, if the lack of search in Outlook is hurting your productivity you may consider this a necessary risk.
I hope this helps someone!
