February 2022 Patch Tuesday hits Windows 11 and 10 — expect one big fix and security updates

Windows 11 Update Windowsupdate Estimate New Dark
Windows 11 Update Windowsupdate Estimate New Dark (Image credit: Daniel Rubino / Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • February 2022's Patch Tuesday has arrived for Windows 11 and various iterations of Windows 10.
  • Expect more of the same: Security updates, servicing stack updates, and one highlighted fix.

For anyone who's been closely following the Patch Tuesdays of recent months, don't expect any radical surprises this time around. It's more of the same for both Windows 11 and 10: Security updates, servicing stack updates, and in the case of W11, one key change.

To quickly go over what the security updates contained: Microsoft closed the book on 48 vulnerabilities with this Patch Tuesday, though none of said vulnerabilities had a "critical" designation. One zero-day vulnerability got cleaned up: CVE-2022-21989. It's the "Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability," which you can read more about over at Microsoft's security update guide.

As for the remainder of this month's exciting Patch Tuesday inclusions, there are servicing stacks as far as the eye can see, and one key fix for Windows 11, which Microsoft outlines in its patch notes:

Addresses an issue that causes a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) modify operation to fail if the operation contains the SamAccountName and UserAccountControl attributes. The error message is, "Error: 0x20EF. The directory service encountered an unknown failure".

And there you have it! That's the long and short of Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 and 10. If you want to see the specific patch notes for your version of Windows 10 to triple-confirm there's absolutely nothing else lurking in the weeds, just check out Windows Update's twitter thread (yes, it's an official account), which contains links to each Patch Tuesday update log.

See more

Don't expect anything juicy to be hiding in those pages. And keep an eye out for reports on what happens after this Patch Tuesday; last month's updates caused some serious issues for Windows PCs.

Robert Carnevale

Robert Carnevale is the News Editor for Windows Central. He's a big fan of Kinect (it lives on in his heart), Sonic the Hedgehog, and the legendary intersection of those two titans, Sonic Free Riders. He is the author of Cold War 2395. Have a useful tip? Send it to robert.carnevale@futurenet.com.