Microsoft Excel for the past week has been hanging or crashing on iOS and iPadOS devices, to customers’ great annoyance.<\/p>\n
The problems appear to have begun following the release of Excel version 2.102.1 for iOS and iPadOS<\/a> on October 13, 2025. The release added support for Apple’s Liquid Glass design, which debuted with the September 15, 2025 release of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 \u2013 also credited with dozens of bugs<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Register downloaded Excel for iOS, version 2.102.2, released three days ago, and found the app non-functional. The “+ Create” icon did not respond to touch events, which prevented the creation of a new spreadsheet from the menu of provided templates.<\/p>\n “Optimized for better performance, this update brings a refreshed look and smoother navigation to help you get to your content faster,” Microsoft said in its Excel for iOS release notes.<\/p>\n If you can get your content at all. Reports of problems began surfacing about a week ago and have continued since then.\u00a0<\/p>\n An October 17, 2025 Microsoft forum post<\/a> titled “iOS Excel app not working” says, “I have noticed in the last few days that the Excel app is malfunctioning on my iPhone. Version 2.102.1. I have tried deleting and reinstalling it. The app seems to struggle when I search for text in spreadsheets. It starts to hang and freeze.”<\/p>\n Other relevant Microsoft forum posts in the past week include “Excel issue<\/a>,” “Last update Excel is a disaster on iOS<\/a>,” “Excel and Office documents freezing on iPhone<\/a>,” “None of my 365 apps are working on iPadOS 26<\/a>,” “Excel on iPad glitching\/keeps freezing<\/a>,” “Experiencing Excel issues on iPad since latest app update<\/a>.”<\/p>\n Recent Apple App Store reviews echo these complaints. “Completely unusable after the latest update to iOS 26,” wrote user Bujax99 on October 20, 2025. “I can’t even work on any file without the app just freezing after the first interaction. The last update of the app from Monday only mentions ‘bug fixes’ but there are clearly other more severe issues.”<\/p>\n A thread on Reddit<\/a> has aggregated these complaints and others, describing screen freezes and network disconnection issues related to Excel.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thread author “hkgmaths” lays into Microsoft for allowing this issue to fester for days without providing any workarounds or a timeline to fix the issue.<\/p>\n “This has been the gold standard in customer service at Microsoft as usual, where ‘prompt response’ means ‘eternal radio silence,'” the thread author wrote.<\/p>\n “This is the new industry standard in implementation, where sandbox means production. Why beta-test when you can alpha-bomb live users and watch them scramble.”<\/p>\n Microsoft declined to comment.<\/p>\n Some developers argue that software quality is declining<\/a>, and cite various data points to support that view<\/a>. Of course, complaining about how software is broken has been a popular talking point for many years<\/a>. Blame has been attributed to outsourcing and cost reduction<\/a>, enshittification<\/a>, AI code help<\/a>, deadlines and lack of incentives<\/a>, and the list goes on.<\/p>\n A decade ago, developers in the Apple ecosystem became more vocal in their complaints about software quality<\/a>. But as we noted back then, it’s difficult to make a definitive assessment about software quality over time in the absence of internal bug report data.<\/p>\n Microsoft has reported a correlation between developer satisfaction and code quality<\/a> [PDF], and between code ownership and software quality<\/a> [PDF]. It would seem, however, that laying off software testers, as occurred in 2018<\/a>, or software developers, as occurred this year<\/a>, isn’t likely to improve software quality.<\/p>\n Without bug data from Microsoft, we can only look at the other current issues facing the Windows world<\/a> and wonder. According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella<\/a>, about 30 percent of the company’s recent code for some projects is written by AI. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft Excel for the past week has been hanging or crashing on iOS and iPadOS devices, to customers’…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":523343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3159],"tags":[547,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-523342","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-mobile","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115426099547691577","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/523343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}