KB5002623: Microsoft fixes Office, Outlook, Word, Excel KB5002700 hangs and freezes

The Microsoft 365 and Office support team has had a busy time recently. The company was hit with two major outages in the last couple of days, with the Exchange Admin Center problem first, followed by the Family subscription issue.

Besides those emergencies, the company has also been resolving other problems, like the one related to Classic Outlook downloads.

Another fairly major problem it has now fixed is the KB5002700 Office 2016 issue, which led to apps freezing and hanging. This affected Outlook, Word and Excel. Microsoft has resolved the issue with a sort of "hotfix" KB5002623 update. Microsoft explains:

ISSUE

Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Outlook might stop responding after you install the KB5002700 security update for Office 2016.

STATUS: FIXED

This issue is resolved by installing the April 10, 2025, update for Office 2016 (KB5002623).

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KB5002623

This article describes update 5002623 for Microsoft Office 2016 that was released on April 10, 2025.

Be aware that the update in the Microsoft Download Center applies to the Microsoft Installer (.msi)-based edition of Office 2016. It doesn't apply to the Office 2016 Click-to-Run editions, such as Microsoft Office 365 Home.

Improvements and fixes

This update fixes the known issue in KB 5002700 that causes Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Outlook to stop responding.

Microsoft notes that to "restore the full Office 2016 suite to a working state, you must have both updates KB5002700 and KB5002623 installed." You can find the support article here on Microsoft's website.

Aside from this, Microsoft has also fixed a keyboard input-related problem on Word last month, wherein the backspace and enter keys would not work inside a list. Microsoft wrote:

ISSUE

Users might experience issues with the enter and backspace keys not performing their expected functions within a list, preventing users from exiting the list.

STATUS: FIXED

The Word team has fixed this issue in Word builds 17619.20000 (version 2405) and greater. The problem was caused by incorrectly set AutoCorrect options. The fix automatically resets all your AutoCorrect options to their defaults if they are detected in the problematic state.

The support article can be viewed here on Microsoft's official website.