4 hours ago
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is a senior editor and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.
Microsoft is now rolling out an out-of-band fix for Windows 11 to address a major bug the company introduced with its latest monthly Windows 11 update. The original update released on October 14th accidentally broke the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), leaving people unable to use a USB mouse or keyboard to recover their PCs or factory reset them.
A non-functional recovery environment is obviously a pretty major issue, so Microsoft rushed out a fix in less than a week. The update, KB5070773, was released yesterday for the latest 24H2 and 25H2 versions of Windows 11, restoring USB mouse and keyboard functionality in WinRE.
It’s unusual for Microsoft to issue out-of-band updates for Windows, unless there’s an urgent security fix required. However, Microsoft was forced to issue a similar emergency patch for Windows 11 in June, after the May security update caused some PCs to enter the recovery environment and fail to start.
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