BitLocker recovery screen locks users out on boot

July’s Patch Tuesday greeted users with an unexpected BitLocker recovery screen on boot — the kind that demands a 48-character recovery key most people have never seen and certainly didn’t write down. This wasn’t a security event; the update just confused BitLocker into thinking something had changed. The issue hit across all July 2024 Patch Tuesday updates, affecting multiple Windows versions simultaneously. Windows N edition users also lost their taskbar entirely. Automation scripts broke because Windows Installer silently changed its UAC behavior. The BitLocker fix arrived a month later in August, by which point countless users had already factory reset their machines.