I saw this issue mentioned on the sysadmin subreddit but I haven’t had a chance to look into it more deeply. If there’s a fix that is shared in the article I’ll take a crack at making a worklet out of it.

Microsoft issued an out-of-band patch available manually through the Windows Update Catalog. It’s a 300MB MSU file with a required reboot unfortunately ☹

Is Microsoft recommending installing this in advance? If we wait until people have the problem then a worklet won’t be able to help if they can’t connect to the internet, right?

Microsoft is recommending “selective” deployment. The current workaround is a reboot which provides temporarily relief to the issue. I guess a user initiated reboot followed by a remote update push would likely be the current go-to for resolution. Not ideal but better than the alternative. We’re holding back on a full push out of fears of further breakage and just deploying as-needed.

I thought I had read that a reboot doesn’t always fix it - am I misremembering or is that sometimes the case?

It’s a bit hit or miss. The good news, the issue mostly affects MS services (not great when we have Automox on Azure SAML…) We’ve noticed while Office apps, native and web, are generally impacted sites like the NYTimes hum away no problem. If this holds true Automox may be primed to inject this patch even on affected workstations as the Agent likely still has a working heartbeat. Again not confirmed but seems to be our initial assessment.

Makes sense - I’ll see if we can put a worklet together to push out the patch. Then you can have your users notify you if it happens to them, and you can push it out to just the affected ones.

Thanks Nic, figured it may help a few poor souls in the community…

Ok the worklet is live! Huge props to @awhitman for the quick turnaround on this one.

@awhitman Nice work! Going to test this out today.