Microsoft Office 2016 Error "We're sorry something went wrong ... 0x8004FC12"

Question

When starting up Microsoft Office 365 or Office 2016 for first time, I'm getting an error "We're sorry something went wrong and we can't do this for you right now. Please try again later (0x8004FC12)". Later apparently means never. How can I fix this?

Answer 1

A solution search reveals lots of unhelpful websites with garbage answers. Here's the solution that worked for me. Enter the following in a Command prompt (DOS box) which has Administrator privleges. See Office 365 Activation Fix for more info. Can someone explain why these steps have become necessary?

  net localgroup Administrators localservice /add
  fsutil resource setautoreset true C:\
  netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt      (might be optional command)

Answer 2

Apparently this happens when the Microsoft Office Click-to-Run Service become disabled. In my case I completely disabled it instead of setting it to manual start some time before the error occurred, and forgot that I did it. THIS page has some additional useful information and solutions for related errors.

Solution-1

Find the windows service application and run it. Then look for the Click-to-Run entry and make sure it is set to start. Then start it manually and try starting word (or excel etc) again.

Alternatively, if you're a command line junkie, you can accomplish the same through the Admin CMD window or Power Shell:

sc config clicktorunsvc start=auto
sc start clicktorunsvc

For other error and more details, see the link I provided.

Answer 3

Alternatively clear out everything Microsoft Office 2013/365/2016 with a Microsoft tool

Option 2 - Completely uninstall Office with the easy fix tool

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Uninstall-Office-2016-Office-2013-or-Office-365-from-a-PC-9dd49b83-264a-477a-8fcc-2fdf5dbf61d8?ui=en-US&rs=en-GB&ad=GB

Then install your desired version again.

Worked for me.

Answer 4

This seems to be a very common problem with ClickToRun installations of Office, as there are a lot of customers complaining on the Microsoft Answers forums. Microsoft published an article about this but it usually doesn't help. Also the "Microsoft Fix it" program usually doesn't help.

In my experience none of the suggested workarounds helped. If you have an old-style installation media (non ClickToRun), try with that. Otherwise, probably the only solution is to reinstall Windows to cleanup the mess that ClickToRun left in the Registry.