Learn about the Windows 11 January update issues, including black screens, Outlook failures, and corporate service disruptions. Microsoft released patches to fix the problems.
© E. Vartanyan
The January update for Windows 11 has turned into a major headache for users and administrators. Released by Microsoft as KB5074109 for the first Patch Tuesday of 2026, this update brought a slew of critical issues instead of the expected security improvements. Problems range from black screens on home PCs to corporate service failures and complete Outlook outages.
Issued on January 13 for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2, the update contained around a hundred fixes. These included patches for three zero-day vulnerabilities and an NPU update. However, shortly after installation, users began reporting widespread, brief black screens that freeze the desktop for one to two seconds. The issue affects systems with both NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards, though the exact cause remains unclear. Some users also experienced their desktop backgrounds spontaneously resetting to solid black.
Separately, users of Outlook Classic with POP accounts were hit hard. After the update, the email client may fail to launch, even though the outlook.exe process continues running in the background. Attempting to restart it prompts a message that the application is already open. The only temporary workaround is to manually end the process via Task Manager each time. Microsoft has acknowledged the issue, but a full fix for Outlook was still unavailable at the time of publication.
The most painful impact was felt by corporate clients. Users of Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 faced a complete inability to connect, with the authentication process breaking at the credential entry stage and returning error 0x80080005. For businesses, this effectively meant downtime for work environments and services.
Microsoft was forced to intervene urgently. On January 17, the company released out-of-band patches that roll back the problematic change via the Known Issue Rollback mechanism. Updates KB5077744 for versions 24H2 and 25H2, along with KB5077797 for version 23H2, must be installed manually from the Microsoft Update catalog. While these patches are pending, the company recommends temporarily using the web clients for Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop. This January update is already being called one of the most problematic starts to a year for Windows 11.