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What Microsoft said about the latest Windows 11 emergency update
The latest out-of-band update has rolled out to fix a widespread issue where “Classic Outlook profiles with POP accounts and PSTs hang after Windows updates on January 13, 2026. The latest emergency update is available for Windows 11 25H2, Windows 11 23H2 and Windows 10. Microsoft added that the new updates are “cumulative and include security fixes and improvements from the January 13, 2026, security update and the out-of-band update from January 17, 2026. Since Microsoft rolled out the January 2026 Patch Tuesday updates, Outlook users have been experiencing freezes when opening the app if a PST file is stored in cloud services such as OneDrive or Dropbox.
Microsoft has now confirmed that the problem is more limited.
The fix follows reports that the mandatory January security cycle rendered Microsoft’s email client “completely unusable” for millions of users, leading to failed restarts and missing data. This emergency update follows a similar update from last week, which addressed a failure-to-shut-down issue and, according to Windows Latest, “a much more widespread” remote desktop login failure affecting 24H2 and 25H2. Microsoft has issued an emergency update to resolve a critical flaw in Outlook triggered by recent system patches. The company wrote: “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.