Microsoft breaks millions of webcams with Win 10 update

Last week, the majority of US Windows 10 users received a big update from Microsoft nicknamed the “Anniversary Update”, primarily because it was initially released on Aug 2, approximately one year after the official launch of Microsoft’s latest operating system. Amongst a host of improvements to core features like Edge and Cortana and presumably numerous bug fixes, the update also managed to render millions of webcams inoperable. Depending on what you use your computer (and webcam) for, and even what generation you hail from, the impact of this could have been non-existant to a complete showstopper. In the ongoing videochat fight, Apple and Google just scored a TKO without even stepping into the ring.

What this means for you:

Obviously if you don’t use Windows 10 and a webcam, feel free to point and laugh or shake your head in sympathy. What might make this very aggravating for the average Windows 10 user is that they may not even know their computer was updated last week. All they know is their Skype or favorite videochat app is now locking up after a minute with no visible explanation. Even more exasperating is Microsoft’s new rollback policy for Windows 10. Previous versions of Windows allowed the user to uninstall any MS update applied to their system at any time. Now, with Windows 10, you have ten days to rollback your OS to a previous version, otherwise you are just out of luck. In the grand scheme of things, ten days is a very short time to figure out the root cause of an obscure problem like this, so you can imagine that many folks are discovering the root cause of this problem too late to easily solve it.

Though Microsoft has finally acknowledged the problem (WARNING: technical jargon galore!), a patch is unlikely to be released until September. Until that day arrives, the only fix is to rollback the Anniversary update (if you catch it within 10 days) or manually edit your computer’s registry. Buying another webcam won’t necessarily fix this problem unless you know for a fact it can process video through a codec known as YUY2, as Microsoft intentionally removed support for the more common MJPEG and H.264 protocols. According to them, these two older codecs have significant performance issues and support was removed to improve Windows 10. So now instead of degrading performance, your webcam will have zero impact on your computers performance. Working as intended?