Recently Microsoft has been on what seems like an endless path of blunders. Following that pattern some troubling events happened this month, January, 2026. While last week brought a worldwide outage to any Outlook user with a mailbox hosted in Microsoft’s Azure cloud, updates this month have also broken software locally installed on your computer.

What Happened?

This month Microsoft issued an update that, while fixing some things, broke Outlook and other tools that access your cloud data. An example of such a program is Dropbox. The update, specifically KB5074109 released on January 13, 2026, causes Outlook to freeze when opening. Other products are unable to reach the cloud, so your data is not available.

Were We (HelpBox) or You Affected?

Most importantly, you need to do nothing to address this problem. While millions were adversely affected by this bug, clients of HelpBox were not affected. Business continued and will continue as usual.

How HelpBox Avoided This Crisis

HelpBox employs two tactics to keep clients insulated by blunders such as this.

Deferral of Updates

With your PC at home, your Mac, your phone, even your car (e.g. Tesla), updates are installed automatically by default. While that is done to keep you safe in our dangerous, connected world, it also brings risk. This is not the first time Microsoft has pushed out a serious bug. Apple has done the same recently with iPhone updates. Specific to Windows, HelpBox intercepts these updates and holds them. An exemption to this behavior is if an immediate fix for a serious exploitation (aka zero-day exploit) is pushed out. Then we release it immediately. Otherwise we queue up the fixes… and we wait… usually one-to-two weeks. We do so to see if the so-called fixes cause problems with others. If not, we release them to your machines at night. In this particular situation, once all the problems related to the "fix" were known we declined, on your behalf, to allow the offending update to deploy.

Rejection of Windows 11

Windows 11 is a disaster in many ways. The details of this will be the subject of another newsletter. The bug described in this letter affected Windows 11 machines only. While Microsoft discontinued Windows 10 in October, 2025, and is forcing users and companies to move to Windows 11, we are not budging. Windows 11 is a serious step backward in productivity, usability, and especially security. By denying and defying the update mandate we, along with 1/2 billion other users (mostly corporate), are eliminating as much risk as possible. The rejection by so many has caused its own crisis within Microsoft as they contemplate how much of their existing plan to exploit and monetize Windows users needs to be rolled back.

If you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact us.

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