Aurich Lawson
Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday updates for Windows are usually for to fix problems, but that’s not always how it happens. The January updates, released last week, caused some problems for companies in particular. Most serious, especially for people still dealing with pandemic-related remote work setups, was a bug that interrupted certain types of VPN connections. Microsoft has provided fixes for this and other issues to date, days after acknowledging the issue on its Known Issues page.
According to Microsoft documentation and Bleeping Computer report, VPN connection issues affected “IPSEC connections that contain a provider ID”, as well as L2TP and IPSEC IKE VPN connections in Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server versions 2022, 20H2, 2019, and 2016. The VPN client appears to be most commonly affected, but third-party VPN clients using this type of connection may also experience the error.
The latest round of Patch Tuesday updates also caused issues for Windows Server, including unexpected restarts for domain controllers and failed boots for Hyper-V virtual machines. These issues were all resolved by further out-of-band patches, but not before causing trouble for beleaguered IT admins.
Microsoft also fixed an issue that caused ReFS-formatted disks to either not display at all or display as unformatted raw disks. Microsoft also fixed this problem, but not before blame the problem about “unsupported” use of ReFS on removable drives. The ReFS file system was supported in consumer versions of Windows for a few years, although Microsoft removed the ability to create ReFS drives a few years ago, limiting it to server and enterprise editions of Windows.
