Microsoft has confirmed that it has published a full fix for an issue in Windows that causes application shortcuts to disappear from the Start menu or taskbar. Several IT admins detailed the issue on Twitter and Reddit this morning, and Microsoft has confirmed that it’s related to Microsoft Defender’s recent threat detection update, theverge reports.
The issue affects businesses and organizations that use Microsoft 365 and Defender to protect against malware, viruses, and other threats.
In a note to customers, Microsoft said it had received reports that a specific Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rule was causing issues, and earlier today, IT admins tried to fix the problem by setting the “Block Win32 API calls to Office macros” rule for audit only.
Microsoft says it has “reinstated the rule to prevent further impact while we investigate further”.
However, it took hours to publish the fix before Microsoft announced its full release, and now the bad news is that the fix does not restore deleted shortcuts as described in the Microsoft release details.
“This caused a bad day yesterday, and IT admins were scrambling to fix the problem and bring shortcuts back, with many having to tell Windows users to manually launch their applications from where they were installed or use the start and executable name.
Three IT administrators facing the issue in their organizations confirmed to The Verge that all of the shortcuts are gone — not just shortcuts to Microsoft apps.
Regular Windows users and consumers are not affected by this strange error, and it will only affect devices managed within organizations, however there are hundreds or thousands of devices in large organizations that depend on Microsoft Threat Detection Security.
