The OfficeApps view is sometimes really slow

Question

I'm putting URLs like https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=[Moderator note: personal info removed].pptx in a iframe to show documents in a webpage.

Sometimes, the page is stuck for many seconds in the "We're fetching your file...

Please wait a moment while we retrieve your file from its home on the internet" ... even if the document is only a few kb...

Is there an issue with the viewer?

Answer 1

Dear Sebastien Leroux , Mattias Jönsson , Claus Hansen and Konstantina Roumelioti

Thank you for your continued feedback, and I’m sorry to hear that the previous suggestions did not help resolve the issue.

Considering that similar behavior is being reported by multiple users and across different tenants, I would strongly recommend that a Microsoft 365 administrator from your organization:

• Report the issue via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, or
• Create a support ticket directly from the Admin Center

This allows Microsoft support engineers to correlate your report with telemetry from other affected tenants and determine whether this is related to an emerging service‑side issue. If confirmed, Microsoft may escalate it to an official advisory or incident in the Service Health dashboard. As this forum is a user‑to‑user community, I unfortunately do not have access to internal diagnostic tools or backend telemetry required to further investigate tenant‑level or service‑side issues.

Thank you for your understanding.

Answer 2

I have the same issue - very very long wait time to load and to navigate. Issue showed up approx two days ago (at least it was working fine on Sunday).

One suggested solution is using 'embed' in the URL instead of 'view' - i am using 'embed' - same issue.

Answer 3

We are having the exact same issue, this was working fine just days ago.

We haven't changed anything on our end, so the error seem to be at the MS end.

Answer 4

Please note that Q&A forum is a public platform, and moderators will modify the question to hide personal information in the description. Kindly ensure that you hide any personal or organizational information the next time you post an error or other details to protect personal data.

Hello Sebastien Leroux

When a document is embedded using the following format: https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=<Document_URL> Microsoft’s service must:

• Reach your source URL and fully download the file from its public hosting location (server-to-server).
• Resolve any embedded or linked external content inside the document (images, charts, fonts, etc.).
• Load the viewer’s own static resources.

Any slowdown in the first two steps causes exactly the behavior you described. Network latency and routing between Microsoft’s servers and your file host are likely culprits. I tested the same documents directly and saw similar intermittent delays depending on network conditions. For better performance, you could try:

• Switching to the embed-optimized endpoint: https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/embed.aspx?src=…
• Hosting the files on OneDrive, SharePoint, or a fast global CDN instead of the current server.
• Removing any external linked images/charts/resources from the PowerPoint files.
• Testing with files hosted in a geographically closer location to your users.

Hope this helps.

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Answer 5

The behavior is typically caused by network and content-loading conditions rather than a general issue with the Office viewer itself.

When a document is opened in Office on the web (such as via view.officeapps.live.com in an iframe), the service must:

1. Reach the source URL and download the file.
2. Resolve any linked or embedded external content (for example, images, data, or other files hosted remotely).
3. Load required static resources (JavaScript, CSS, images) for the Office web application.

Delays in any of these steps can cause the “We’re fetching your file…” message to remain for several seconds, even for small files.

From the provided information:

• If only some documents are slow, they may contain links to other remote resources that are slow, moved, or unavailable. The viewer waits while trying to reach those sources.
• If all documents are slow, overall network latency or bandwidth constraints between the client, Office on the web, and the document’s host can cause the delay.

To improve performance:

1. Check documents for external links
   • Remove or update links to remote content that is slow, moved, or unavailable.
2. Improve network conditions
   • Reduce network congestion and verify that latency and bandwidth between clients and the document host are adequate.
3. Preload Office on the web static content (for custom hosts)
   • If hosting documents via WOPI, use the preloadview (and optionally preloadedit) actions from the discovery XML to preload Microsoft 365 for the web static content into the browser cache before opening the document. This reduces the time needed to load the viewer itself.

These steps address the common causes of intermittent slowness rather than indicating a general outage or defect in the viewer.

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References:

• Why am I getting the message "Contacting the server for information"?
• Load Time Performance