OpenSSH completely broken, service silently fails

Microsoft confirmed that this update broke OpenSSH. The sshd service silently refused to start — no error messages, no logging, just nothing. Every SSH connection attempt simply failed. This affected enterprise customers, IoT deployments, education systems, and anyone who relied on remote shell access to Windows machines. Microsoft’s fix? Manually adjust ACL permissions on C:\ProgramData\ssh and C:\ProgramData\ssh\logs. The bug persisted through every update from October 2024 through March 2025 — five months of broken SSH on the world’s most popular desktop operating system.