Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday updates for Windows generally aim to: to repair problems, but that’s not always the case. The January updates, released last week, caused a handful of problems for businesses in particular. The most serious, especially for people still dealing with pandemic-driven remote work setups, was a bug that cut certain types of VPN connections. Microsoft has provided fixes for this and other issues starting today, a few days after the issue was recognized on the Known Issues page.
According to Microsoft’s documentation and reporting from Bleeping Computer, the VPN connection issues related to “IPSEC connections containing a vendor ID”, as well as L2TP and IPSEC IKE VPN connections in Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server versions 2022 , 20H2, 2019 , and 2016. Windows’ built-in VPN client seems to be the most affected, but third-party VPN clients using these types of connections may also encounter the error.
The latest round of Patch Tuesday updates also caused some issues for Windows Server, including unexpected reboots of domain controllers and boot failures for Hyper-V virtual machines. These problems have all been solved by other out-of-band patches, but not before they caused problems for the beleaguered IT administrators.
Microsoft also fixed an issue that caused ReFS-formatted disks not to appear at all or as raw, unformatted disks. Microsoft also fixed this problem, but not before it was blamed for the “unsupported” use of ReFS on removable drives. The ReFS file system was supported in the consumer versions of Windows for a few years, although Microsoft removed the ability to create ReFS disks a few years ago, limiting it to servers and the enterprise editions of Windows.