Teams and Outlook won't open on some Surfaces, and the fix hides in the Store

If you own a Surface Pro 11 or a Surface Laptop 7 and Microsoft Teams has quietly stopped opening, it isn't something you did. Microsoft has confirmed that after KB5121003, the 11 August security update, Teams and the new Outlook for Windows may refuse to launch or close on their own. It's specific to ARM-based PCs. Classic Outlook, Word and Excel carry on working normally, which is part of why this took a while to pin down.

The workaround is odd enough to spell out, because nobody would arrive at it by guessing. Open the Microsoft Store, go to Downloads, click Check for updates, and let the Auto Super Resolution Package update to version 1.0.19.0 or later. That package is a Copilot+ feature for making games look sharper on the fly, which has no visible connection to email, and yet an out-of-date copy of it is what keeps these two apps from starting. The trouble shows up mostly on new or freshly set up machines where the Store hasn't fetched anything yet.

Microsoft marked the issue mitigated on 1 September and says a permanent fix is coming in a future Windows update, without naming a date. Until then the Store step is the entire remedy and it takes about a minute.

There's a wider lesson sitting in it. The Microsoft Store updates on its own schedule, which on a brand new PC can mean weeks of nothing happening, and one component a version behind can break an app that looks completely unrelated to it. Tendvane's check-for-updates puts what Windows Update is offering into a single view, so the permanent fix registers with you the day it arrives rather than whenever you next think to look.