Microsoft Ships Emergency Fix for Its Record-Breaking September Windows 11 Patch

Microsoft has begun rolling out an emergency, out-of-band update that fixes the problems introduced by the September Patch Tuesday release — the biggest in the company's history. That set of fixes closed some thousand vulnerabilities, but along with them, new bugs crept into the system, affecting enterprise users, developers, and gamers alike.

What exactly broke

The September patch disrupted shared folders in Hyper-V–based Linux virtual machines, Remote Desktop Services sessions, and some USB audio devices. The out-of-band update, released yesterday, fixes these issues in Windows 11 versions 26H1, 25H2, and 24H2. Fixes were also delivered for Windows Server 2025 and 2022, the LTSC editions of Windows 10, and Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2.

A troubling pattern

Out-of-band updates used to be a rarity for Microsoft, but this year such releases have become almost routine. In January, the company had to ship four emergency updates in a row after a botched Windows 11 patch. Two more followed in March — over installation failures and problems signing in to Microsoft accounts. And in July, an out-of-band update was needed to fix an Intel driver issue that caused performance drops and faster battery drain.

An interesting picture emerges: the larger the scheduled patch, the greater the chance that another one — an emergency fix this time — will follow. A record for the number of vulnerabilities closed turned into a record for the number of side effects that had to be hastily patched up.

Source: The Verge