Published January 14, 2022
Author: Ash Khan

Microsoft known for Office 365 has withdrawn the Windows Server upgrades released on Patch Tuesday after administrators discovered significant flaws that broke 3 things: They cause Windows servers acting as domain controllers to enter into spontaneous boot loops, causing Hyper-V to fail, and ReFS volume systems to become inaccessible. 

the news about Windows breaking was initially reported on Tuesday, the same day Microsoft issued a mega-dump of ninety-seven security upgrades in its January 2022 Patch Tuesday upgrade. 

January’s batch contained the Windows Server 2012 R2 KB5009624 upgrade, Windows Server 2019 KB5009557 upgrade, and Windows Server 2022 KB5009555 upgrade, each of which appears to be bugged. 

“Admins of Windows Domain Controllers should exercise caution while applying the January 2022 security upgrades,” according to IT consultants. 

There have been multiple complaints that Windows systems operating as domain controllers will no longer boot. Lsass.exe (or wininit.exe) causes a blue screen with the error code 0xc0000005. As per our assessment, it can affect all Windows Server versions that act as domain controllers. 

Domain controllers are servers responsible for handling verification requests inside a Windows domain. Microsoft’s Hyper-V, the other component of Windows that has been disrupted by the Windows Server upgrades, is a local hypervisor that can build virtual machines on x86-64 Windows computers. 

According to the company, the third object that has been shattered by the changes is the Resilient File System (ReFS), which is a file system meant to boost accessibility, scale quickly to big data sets throughout varied workloads, and guarantee data integrity with resistance to distortion. 

We noted a slew of user feedback concluding that the problem impacts all available Windows Server versions. 

Several Reddit users verified the issues. According to one user, “KB5009557 (2019) and KB5009555 (2022) appear to be leading things to collapse on domain controllers, which subsequently continue rebooting after every several minutes.” 

Some other Reddit users reported on Tuesday that they had recently restarted Windows 10 PCs with the KB5009543 and KB5008876 patches loaded and discovered that they were also disabling L2TP VPN connections. 

“Now their L2TP VPNs to various websites (All SonicWall’s) are not functioning,” the Redditor explained, quoting an error message that interprets: “The L2TP connection request was denied because the security layer detected a processing issue during early talks with the other computer.” 

After the server upgrade saga, it was reported yesterday that Microsoft has withdrawn the January Windows Server continuous upgrades, that are no longer available through Windows Update. Nevertheless, as of yesterday’s afternoon, the firm has not removed the Windows 10 and Windows 11 continuous upgrades that were causing L2TP VPN connections to fail. 

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