Microsoft has admitted that Windows 11 VPN connection failures caused by last month’s security updates are still not properly fixed, despite briefly marking the issue as resolved earlier this month.
As first reported by BleepingComputer, the company has reversed a status change it made on 13th October, moving its official Windows health dashboard entry back from “Resolved” to “Mitigated”. Microsoft said the earlier update had been posted in error and apologised for the confusion it caused IT administrators.
The underlying fault dates back to September’s security updates. After installing them, some Windows 11 24H2 and later devices began struggling to maintain Always On VPN connections, particularly where a profile was set to automatically select or fall back between the IKEv2 and SSTP protocols.
Affected connections could get stuck showing “Connecting” indefinitely, or fail outright on a second attempt with an error reading “the specified port is already in use”.
Always On VPN is built into Windows and is mainly used by employers and IT departments to connect remote and home working staff automatically to a corporate network, rather than something most people set up themselves.
Microsoft first flagged the problem to administrators through a service alert in late September. Following October’s Patch Tuesday cumulative updates, the company marked the fault as resolved, only to reverse that call on 21st October.
A genuine fix is now promised “in the coming weeks”. In the meantime, Microsoft’s advice is to abandon automatic protocol selection and configure Always On VPN profiles to use either SSTP or IKEv2 exclusively, depending on the network environment.
It is the latest in a run of problems tied to the same update. September’s release has also been linked to issues affecting Hyper-V, Remote Desktop Services, USB audio, domain sign-in failures and a File History backup bug, several of which needed emergency out-of-band patches of their own.
For most people running a dedicated consumer VPN for everyday browsing or streaming, none of this will be noticeable. Services such as ExpressVPN manage their own protocols independently of Windows’ built-in networking stack, so running one sidesteps this particular fault entirely rather than relying on a corporate client tied to Windows updates.
The bug only touches Windows’ native Always On VPN client, typically deployed by an employer rather than installed voluntarily.
Anyone managing remote access for a business, or connecting to a work network through a Windows-configured VPN profile, is the group that should expect continued disruption until Microsoft ships a proper fix.
In the meantime, affected users are best off asking their IT department to switch the protocol setting manually rather than waiting on the automatic update to sort itself out.
The back and forth also highlights a wider pattern this year. Windows 11’s 24H2 update cycle has been dogged by a string of knock-on faults since its rollout, and Microsoft’s own health dashboard, intended to give administrators a clear, trustworthy view of known issues, has itself become a source of confusion after being updated incorrectly.
For UK businesses that lean on Windows-managed VPN profiles to keep hybrid and home-working staff connected securely, that makes it harder to plan around patch cycles with any confidence.
There is no suggestion that the fault has been exploited or that it creates a security risk beyond the inconvenience of dropped connectivity. It is a reliability issue rather than a vulnerability, though for IT teams juggling compliance and uptime requirements, a VPN that silently stops connecting can be just as disruptive as one that is actively unsafe.
