Activating Microsoft Office 2024 LTSC Gives Error That Nothing Can Provide a Description Of
11:34 14 Sep 2026

We have one machine running Windows 11 that we removed Office 2019 and installed Office 2024 LTSC on to. Office works fine except that it is complaining it is not activated. When I try and activate the MAK key online via the dialog boxes, I just get an error that says it cannot be activated at this time. When I try and run the activation from the command line via ospp.vbs I get the following error:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16>cscript ospp.vbs /act
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 10.0
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
---Processing--------------------------
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Installed product key detected - attempting to activate the following product:
SKU ID: 41ec56c3-e5ea-4094-895f-c4a65a5a8fc6
LICENSE NAME: Office 24, Office24ProjectPro2024VL_MAK_AE2 edition
LICENSE DESCRIPTION: Office 24, RETAIL(MAK) channel
Last 5 characters of installed product key: 
ERROR CODE: 0xC014C781
ERROR DESCRIPTION: Run the following: cscript ospp.vbs /ddescr:0xC014C781
---------------------------------------
Installed product key detected - attempting to activate the following product:
SKU ID: 84e442c0-87a0-49b5-bcd1-b161b0b35e4b
LICENSE NAME: Office 24, Office24ProPlus2024VL_MAK_AE2 edition
LICENSE DESCRIPTION: Office 24, RETAIL(MAK) channel
Last 5 characters of installed product key: 
ERROR CODE: 0xC014C781
ERROR DESCRIPTION: Run the following: cscript ospp.vbs /ddescr:0xC014C781
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---------------------------------------
---Exiting-----------------------------

Running ospp.vbs again to get the description, I get the following response:

Code:
0xC014C781
Description:
Unable to find a detailed error description.
Unknown facility code of: 0x14 (20L)
Facility error: 0xC781 (51073L)

Doing a search on Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing all return no results for that error code so I have no idea what it means. Does anyone have any experience with this error code or know how to go about debugging it?

windows ms-office