Microsoft breaks USB input in Windows Recovery Environment

With official support for Windows 10 having officially ended a few days ago, let’s take a look and see how its successor, Windows 11, is doing.

Microsoft released the first Patch Tuesday update (KB5066835) for Windows 11 25H2 this past week and it is probably fair to say that it has been a rough start for the new feature update. Despite the announcement of a wide rollout wherein the new version is now available for download for everyone, the company has already confirmed large-scale issues.

First up, Microsoft was forced to issue an emergency workaround as the update broke localhost auth and following that the company today has confirmed another problem where recovery can become impossible if you happen to use a USB keyboard or mouse.
↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin

Yes. This is a real thing. This latest round of patches makes it entirely impossible to navigate the Windows Recovery Environment with USB keyboards and mice. Since it’s 2025, USB is probably the protocol through which most people connect their keyboard and mice (although to be fair, some laptops probably still default to internal PS/2 for their touchpads). This means that if you run into a problem with Windows 11 that requires you to access the Windows Recovery Environment – perhaps OneDrive did too many lines of cocaine again – you can’t actually do anything inside of it.

There’s no fix yet, so you either remove the offending patches, hope your PC still has a PS/2 port and you still have PS/2 peripherals, or hope Windows 11 won’t fall over and die until Microsoft releases a fix for the issue. Of course, people still using Windows 10, people who aren’t installing every single Windows 11 update as they become available, and people using real operating systems have nothing to worry about.

You can’t help but wonder, though – with Microsoft pushing “AI” so hard, how many of these recent faceplants are the result of Microsoft engineers frantically trying to meet code quotas using Copilot?