Microsoft has confirmed that people who are stuck with Windows 10 and don’t plan to upgrade to Windows 11 may experience strange taskbar behavior after installing some recent cumulative updates. No, this is not a penalty for not upgrading to Windows 11 — it’s another known bug that Microsoft will fix in future updates.
Microsoft says the issue causes visual glitches and reduces system stability, causing some components and apps to become unresponsive. If you use Windows 10, you may experience the following symptoms:
- Weather or News and Interests widgets or icons flash on the Windows taskbar
- The Windows taskbar stops responding.
- Windows Explorer stops responding.
- Applications, including Microsoft Word or Excel, may stop responding if they are open when the problem occurs.
According to A post in the official Windows documentation, restarting the system may help alleviate the problem. However, Microsoft has decided to take a more proactive approach and undo the damage using the well-known issue rollback feature. It will take care of the bug without any user input, but it may take up to 24 hours for the system to propagate and fix the affected computers (all Windows 10 consumer versions starting with 20H2 and above).
The software giant promises to release a permanent bug fix with future cumulative updates.
