Office 2016 activation error 0X80072EE2. How to resolve it?

Question

_{Monday, December 14, 2015 5:09 AM}

Hi All,

We are facing some issue with the Office 2016 product activation.

We initially given the product key and it has taken normally.  Later it is trying to activate the office.  After some time we are getting this error:  

"We could not contact server.  Please try again in a few minutes (0X80072EE2)."

Could you please let us know how to resolve it?

Thanks,

Ram.

All replies (3)

_{Tuesday, December 15, 2015 7:37 AM ✅Answered}

Hi,

In this scenario, as I just suggested, you can try activating Office by phone.

As for the issue with the https websites, I'd like to know more details about it.

How many users are affected?

Could you please provide some samples of the these websites?

You can try to add the sites to the Trusted Sites in the Internet Explorer to try again.

For the

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Support

Please mark the reply as an answer if you find it is helpful.

If you have feedback for TechNet Support, contact [email protected].

_{Tuesday, December 15, 2015 3:03 AM}

Hi,

As you mentioned you used the product key to activate Office, is it a retail version(rather than a volume license version)?

Based on the error message, probably there is something blocking the connection to the server to activate Office. In this scenario, an easy way is to activate Office by phone. There should be an Activation Wizard which provides the option to activate Office by phone.

If you don't want to activate Office by phone, please note:

This issue may occur if you configure your Internet connection to use a proxy server that requires authentication. When the Activation Wizard cannot connect through the proxy server to an internal Microsoft server to transfer your installation ID to Microsoft, you receive an error message.

Alternatively, this issue may occur if your firewall software is blocking the attempt to connect to the server through your Internet connection. When the Activation Wizard cannot connect to an internal Microsoft server to transfer your installation ID to Microsoft, you receive an error message.

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Support

Please mark the reply as an answer if you find it is helpful.

If you have feedback for TechNet Support, contact [email protected].

_{Tuesday, December 15, 2015 4:51 AM}

Hi Melon,

Thanks for the reply.

We don't have any proxy servers enabled. Similarly we tried to activate the product by disabling the antivirus i.e. security essentials and also the firewall, but no luck.

We are facing some issue with the https websites.  403 forbidden error we are getting.  Similarly we also getting https error "Your connection to this site is not private".  So I thought first I need to resolve it.

Thanks,

Ram.