Second Win11 emergency out of band update to address disastrous Patch Tuesday

Microsoft's January 2026 Patch Tuesday updates for Windows 11 have been a total disaster, seemingly introducing more problems than it fixed. The botched update has already forced the company to issue one emergency out of band update to fix two major issues, and now a second emergency out of band update has been released to address another critical problem.

This time around, the out of band update is addressing an issue that caused Outlook and "cloud-backed" applications such as OneDrive and Dropbox to be rendered inoperable after Patch Tuesday. The temporary workaround was to uninstall the latest security updates, but now the KB5078127 update for version 24H2 and 25H2 should mitigate this need.

"An out-of-band (OOB) update was released today, January 24, 2026, to address this issue," Microsoft says in newly published documentation. "This cumulative update includes all protections and improvements from the January 2026 Windows security update released January 13, 2026, as well as from the OOB update released on January 17, 2026 (which introduced fixes for two known issues: remote desktop connections and hibernation failures)."

Here's the official changelog for the KB5078127 update from Microsoft:

• Fixed: After installing the Windows update released on and after January 13, 2026, some applications became unresponsive or encountered unexpected errors when opening files from or saving files to cloud-based storage, such as OneDrive or Dropbox. In certain Outlook configurations that store PST files on OneDrive, Outlook may hang and fail to reopen unless the process is terminated or the system is restarted. Users may also see missing sent Items or previously downloaded emails being re‑downloaded.

This same fix is being rolled out to various other versions and editions of Windows too, including Windows 11 version 23H2, Windows Server editions, and more. Be sure to check out the Windows release health dashboard for the latest information impacting your version of Windows.

This is the second emergency out of band update that Microsoft has pushed out for Windows 11 users in a week. The first arrived on January 17, and fixed two major issues that began appearing for users after installing this month's Patch Tuesday updates released on January 13.

The original Patch Tuesday release introduced an issue that caused PCs running version 23H2 to fail to shutdown or hibernate, and also broke signing into Windows 11 PCs using Remote Desktop. Microsoft addressed these issues in the out of band update issued on January 17, but in the process broke apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Dropbox.

It's clear that the quality bar for Windows is at an all time low right now, marking an absolutely dreadful start to the year for Microsoft and Windows. It feels like there's nowhere to go but up at this point, so hopefully things improve with the next Patch Tuesday release.