Microsoft told IT administrators this week that the October 2026 cumulative updates for Windows 11 never actually fixed a bug breaking Always On VPN connections. The company had quietly flagged the issue as resolved on October 13. It wasn't.
A service alert sent Tuesday walks the correction back. The known issue entry, Microsoft says, was "mistakenly updated to Resolved status on October 13, 2026." Its status is now Mitigated, which in Microsoft's documentation means there's a workaround but no real patch. The bug affects Windows 11 24H2 and later, and installing the October updates changes nothing for anyone still hitting it.
The underlying problem goes back to the September 2026 security updates. Always On VPN, the feature that replaced the older DirectAccess tool, is supposed to open a secure tunnel to a corporate network automatically whenever a device gets online, covering domain joined, non domain joined and Microsoft Entra ID joined machines across Windows 10, Windows 11 and Windows Server. After the September patch, that handshake started failing for profiles using automatic protocol selection between IKEv2 and SSTP. If the first connection attempt stumbles, the VPN can get stuck in a Connecting state, fail outright, or throw an error claiming "The specified port is already in use."
For a remote employee, that means losing access to internal company resources until something resets the connection, and it's exactly the kind of failure that's invisible to Microsoft but very visible to a help desk.
The workaround hasn't changed. Administrators need to pull automatic protocol selection out of their Always On VPN profiles and lock each one to a single tunneling protocol instead of letting it fall back between IKEv2 and SSTP. That fixes the crash, but it also means whichever protocol is left has to work reliably on every network an employee might connect from, with no fallback if it doesn't.
Microsoft says a permanent fix is coming "in an update to be released in the coming weeks," without naming a specific date. "We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion," the company told administrators in the alert.
This isn't the only mess trailing September's patch cycle. Microsoft had to ship emergency out-of-band updates after that release broke Hyper-V, caused Remote Desktop Services failures and triggered USB audio problems, and separately published a workaround for a bug that locked some users out of accounts despite valid domain credentials. The October 13 cumulative update did clear up other known issues, including a Windows 11 black screen problem and crashes in File Explorer, just not this one.
Until the real fix lands, organizations running Windows 11 24H2 or later with Always On VPN are stuck choosing between the single-protocol workaround and tolerating intermittent connection failures. Microsoft hasn't said which upcoming update will carry the fix, so IT teams are left watching for the next cumulative release and hoping the status stays at Resolved this time.
CDFiled by The Computing Desk
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