When Windows bug fixes go bad, IT can now roll back individual changes

Microsoft this week announced a new enterprise-only flexibility in Windows servicing that lets IT professionals roll back individual non-security elements of an update when a change breaks something.

The feature, dubbed “Known Issue Rollback,” aka KIR, is an unusually frank admission that the company’s nearly six-year-long experiment of forcing customers to either accept everything in an update or pass on the update entirely, is flawed.

“Even as quality has improved over the last five years, we do acknowledge that sometimes things can and do go wrong,” Namrata Bachwani, principal program manager lead, said in a March 2 session video from Microsoft’s all-virtual Ignite conference. 

”In the past, you had two choices: all or nothing,” Bachwani continued. “You either take it all, so you install the update and you get all the great fixes that you want and the problem, which is causing an issue for your customers. Or you take nothing.

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