Microslope Did It Again (A Patch Tuesday Post-Mortem, Sort Of)

So Microsoft — sorry, Microslope, my b, old habit — just dropped what they’re calling their “biggest Patch Tuesday ever.” 570 vulnerabilities. Fifty nine of them critical. Three zero days, two of which were already being actively exploited in the wild before the fix showed up, which is a fun way of saying “yeah we were late.” A BitLocker bug that could let someone waltz into your encrypted data. And, because apparently no Patch Tuesday is complete without a little chaos garnish on top, they’ve also had to block the update on some Dell machines with certain Intel chips because it was causing shutdowns, overheating, and battery drain.

Cool cool cool. Very cool. Love that for us.

If you’re new here — hi, welcome, this blog has a bit of a history, I quit it once and started it back up, we don’t need to get into it — this isn’t really about the 570 number. Big patch batches happen, thats just how software works, bugs pile up, you fix a bunch at once, whatever. What actually matters is the pattern, and Microsoft has been building quite the pattern over the last year and a half.

A Very Brief, Very Petty History of Recent Disasters

Let’s rewind.

October–November 2025: updates roll out, and suddenly a bunch of people are getting FPS drops in games. Nvidia GeForce cards mostly. Nobody officially owns it for a minute, everyone’s just vibing in confusion, and it eventually gets patched in December with KB5072033. Fine. Annoying but fine.

January 2026 — KB5074109, aka The Big One. This is the update people still bring up in forums like it’s a war they survived. Black screens. Outlook straight up crashing. Remote Desktop breaking. And the crown jewel: a shutdown bug where machines just… wouldn’t shut down. Or hibernate. You’d hit shutdown and your PC would just look at you. Microsoft rushed out KB5078127 to fix it and — plot twist — it didn’t actually fix the shutdown/freeze issue for a lot of people. Some folks had to roll back to a system restore point like it was 2011 again. Later Microsoft admitted the bug was even worse than first thought, hitting devices with Secure Launch and Virtual Secure Mode too. So the “fix the fix” didn’t even fix it, it just fixed it for some people, which — is that even a fix? Is that just a suggestion at that point?

Nvidia, for their part, was telling people to just uninstall the Windows update entirely to stop the black screens and crashes. Which is a wild place for two multi billion dollar companies to land: “sir just delete the update, we don’t know either.”

February 2026: cleanup month. KB5077181 shows up to mop up January’s mess, also quietly fixes an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error that was bricking commercial systems. So, progress? Kind of? We’re basically doing controlled damage repair at this point instead of shipping features, which — okay, actually, we’ll come back to that.

Also February 2026: Nvidia performance issues resurface anyway. 15-20 fps losses, flickering, shadow artifacts, frame gen breaking. Nvidia says they’re “investigating.” Microsoft says nothing, because saying nothing is apparently a strategy now.

March 2026: shutdown bugs. Again. A DIFFERENT shutdown bug, this time on Windows 10, fixed alongisde two more zero days. I want to be clear this is not a typo, this is a second, unrelated instance of Windows forgetting how to turn itself off.

And running underneath all of it: AMD users dealing with random TPM stutter regressions coming back from the dead, Intel systems getting scheduler weirdness after cumulative updates, and just a general sense that every update is a coin flip. Windows 11 reportedly racked up 20+ major update problems across 2025 alone. Twenty. Plus.

So when this July 2026 patch drops with 570 fixes and also has to be held back on Dell/Intel machines because it causes shutdowns and overheating — that’s not a random one-off. That’s just, like, Tuesday. Patch Tuesday, if you will. I’ll see myself out.

Wait, Why Is Windows 11 Specifically This Broken

Genuine question I keep circling back to, because Windows 10 didn’t feel like this. Windows 10 had its bad patches too, everyone remembers a few, but it wasn’t a monthly ritual of “what’s on fire this time.” And Linux distros, sure they have their own weirdness, but nobody’s writing “please delay your kernel update, wait a few days” as a general community mantra the way people now say it about Windows 11.

So what changed? A few things, near as I can tell.

The most talked-about theory, and one Microsoft has never really denied outright, is AI-assisted code. Satya Nadella himself said something like 30% of Microsoft’s code is now written by AI. That number gets thrown around constantly whenever a new bug shows up, to the point where “vibe coding” has basically become the go-to explanation on Reddit for literally any regression, deserved or not. To be fair here — when a Recycle Bin bug showed up in June’s update, garbling filenames in the delete confirmation dialog, there was no confirmed link to AI-written code, and Microsoft never commented on it either way. So it’s not like every single bug has a smoking gun pointing at a chatbot. But the accusation keeps sticking because, well, the broader pattern gives it cover, and Microsoft hasn’t exactly gone out of its way to say “no it’s not that.”

Here’s the more interesting wrinkle though: Microsoft now says attackers are ALSO using AI, to find and exploit Windows bugs faster than ever, sometimes within hours of a patch dropping. That’s apparently a big reason this July’s update ballooned as much as it did. Microsoft’s internal explanation is that they’re now running their own AI bug-hunting system to try and out-pace attacker AI, which finds more bugs, which means bigger patches going forward, forever, apparently. So if I remember what they said right, its less “we got sloppier” and more “everyone’s using AI now, offense and defense both, and the fights just got faster.” Which, fine, sure, but that doesn’t really explain shutdown bugs and Recycle Bin filenames turning into gibberish. Attackers finding your patched CVEs faster doesn’t make the original patch worse quality, those are two different problems getting mashed into one excuse.

My actual take, for what its worth: probably not ONE cause. AI-written code shipping with less scrutiny than before, a QA process that by Microsoft’s own admission needed a whole internal “swarming” team just to start addressing basics, and a genuinely more hostile AI-accelerated attack landscape forcing bigger patches. Windows 10 didn’t have any of that stacked on top of it at this scale. Linux doesn’t either, not yet anyway. Doesn’t mean Linux is magically bug free, it just means it’s not carrying the same pile Windows 11 currently is.

Okay But Are They Actually Fixing Anything

Here’s where I try to be fair, because the whole point of this is to not just be a hater for hating’s sake.

Credit where due: they ARE fixing things. The BitLocker fix in this batch is legitimately serious and good that it’s out. The UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME fix in Feburary mattered to actual businesses running actual systems. They didn’t just let January’s shutdown disaster sit there, they threw two patches at it.

But — and this is the “but” that keeps showing up — the fixes for the fixes keep needing fixes. That’s not a stability story, that’s a company patching in public and hoping nobody notices the seams. And the Dell/Intel block on this exact update is basically Microsoft going “we know this breaks some machines and instead of fixing it before ship, we’re just going to not-ship it to those specific machines.” Which, sure, is responsible in the moment. But it’s also just an admission that testing didn’t catch a known-bad hardware combo before it went out the door to literally everyone else. Held back for Dell, shipped to you. Feel lucky I guess.

Why hold it back instead of just fixing it properly first? Best guess, and I want to stress this is a guess because Microsoft does not call me personally to explain themselves (rude, honestly) — Patch Tuesday runs on a fixed monthly cadence, and there are actively exploited zero days in this batch. You can’t just… not patch two zero days that bad actors are already using because ONE hardware combo has a heat problem. So the calculus becomes: ship the security fix to 99% of machines now, quarantine the 1% that catches fire, sort it out in a follow-up. It’s a reasonable trade-off honestly! It’s just also a trade-off that keeps happening, which starts to look less like “unlucky edge case” and more like “our QA pipeline for hardware combos is not where it needs to be.”

Is Linux Winning, Or Are Gamers Just Done

This is the part I actually think matters more than the bug list.

If I remember the Steam hardware survey numbers right, Linux hit an all time high earlier this year, and Windows actually dipped below its usual dominant share for the first time in a long while. Some of that’s obviously the Steam Deck, SteamOS is Linux wearing a trenchcoat, but from what I recall even the Deck’s own slice of that Linux pie has been shrinking relative to people just running Linux on a normal desktop — meaning it’s not only handheld people, folks are actually choosing it on their main rig now. Windows 10 going end-of-support last October probably pushed a chunk of that too, especially anyone whose hardware didn’t meet the Windows 11 requirements and wasn’t about to buy a whole new PC just to satisfy a TPM chip.

Is that ALL because of buggy patches? No, obviously not, don’t email me. It’s Proton getting good, it’s Steam Deck normalizing the idea that Linux gaming doesn’t suck anymore, it’s Windows 10 sunsetting. Multiple things at once, correlation isn’t a courtroom.

But also — come on. You don’t get headlines like “Windows Update Woes Continue” and “delaying Windows updates is the best strategy in 2026” as actual published article titles, from actual tech outlets, without SOME of that frustration pushing people toward alternatives. When the community-wide advice becomes “wait a few days before installing any Windows update, on principle, always” — that’s not a stable relationship anymore. Thats a relationship where one partner has started sleeping with one eye open.

Has it changed Microsoft’s behavior though? Sort of, allegedly. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri came out earlier this year saying the company would prioritize performance and stability over new features for a while, after the January disaster specifically. Which, if true, would be a genuinely good outcome of all this. But “we said we’d focus on stability” and “March 2026 had ANOTHER shutdown bug” happened in the same calendar year, so. Grain of salt the size of a Dell laptop’s battery, which as we’ve established, is now also on fire.

Anyway

Look, I don’t think Microsoft is secretly evil or whatever, I think they’re a giant company shipping software across an absolutely unhinged number of hardware combinations, and some percentage of chaos is just the tax you pay for that. But the last 18 months specifically have felt less like “normal software has bugs” and more like a company that’s stretched real thin between chasing an AI-first Windows vision and actually keeping the OS boring and reliable, which is genuinely all most people want from an operating system. Nobody wakes up excited about Copilot integration in Notepad. People wake up wanting their PC to, at bare minimum, turn off when they ask it to. Twice now this year, apparently, that was a big ask.

We’ll see if 570 fixes in one go is a “we’re finally getting ahead of it” moment or just a bigger pile that means a bigger pile of side effects next month. I am, historically, not an optimist about this specific company’s Patch Tuesdays. But hey, here I am writing about it again, so what do I know.

Update your BitLocker stuff though, seriously, that one’s not a joke.