Your recommendation now is to uninstall the latest update to mitigate bugs. What’s going on with the quality control for updates, Microsoft?
Windows 11 users are dealing with yet another update headache, and this time, Microsoft is openly telling people to uninstall the problematic patch. Update KB5074109 has triggered a wave of bug reports ranging from performance issues to broken features, and the company has now published guidance urging affected users to roll it back. It’s the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Windows updates causing more problems than they solve.
Recent updates:
Update 5:45 PM ET Jan 23, 2026: We’re seeing reports that people are having issues rolling back the update and seeing error 0x800f0905. If you’re one of those, don’t worry, we have yet another guide to help you out. You can’t make this stuff up! Read: “Windows 11 won’t even let some users uninstall KB5074109 — error 0x800f0905 is blocking the rollback. Try these tips to fix.”
On January 13, 2026, Microsoft started the rollout of the 2026-01 Security Update (KB5074109) (26200.7623) for Windows 11 version 25H2 and 24H2, but shortly after, a number of reports from users started to emerge with different complaints.
For example, we’ve seen reports of apps not working correctly, resulting in error messages such as 0x803F8001. Also, a small number of users have reported random black screens after installing the update KB5074109 on devices featuring NVIDIA GPUs.
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James Ott Jr.
Thank you James for this news. My updates are paused (at home) and I typically put them back on a paused schedule after every update set completes. MS has pushed bad updates how many times now during 2024 and 2025? This is starting to be an annoying bad habit. The corporate side with updates always enabled and immediately applied are the worst to suffer of course.
This is something for all the code development community to take into consideration. Not only how much testing should (or can) take place before release; also how much bad code is released now because of incorrect AI-Advice, and devs using platforms like Terraform to instantly grab the latest libraries, modules etc instantly and build them into their package. How many of those code pieces and libraries are flawed? And how can effective testing really be done, in this \”hurry up and release it\” dev environment?
Not even thinking about digital supply chain attack, where the attacker uploads malevolent code to the repos on purpose, to spread their malware. Which is another big problem today.
Not just MS for the large companies, we all remember the Crowsdstrike update which shut down several airlines last year. Most likely that company has put in a few pauses or \”safety checks\” into their instant-update processes.
This touches on additional cyber best-practices. Such as Disaster Recovery, restore plans and estimated time to recover, and offline-backups. This can be a lead-in to that topic, perhaps? In a future session.
Thank you, -Dean