Fixed disappearance of shortcuts in the “Start” Windows does not return them back

On Friday, Microsoft said an update that was supposed to fix a Windows problem related to

disappearance of application shortcuts in the menu“Start” or on the taskbar, fully expanded. But a few days ago, IT admins described a similar issue on Twitter and Reddit, and Microsoft confirmed that it was related to the recent Microsoft Defender update.

What is known

The problem mainly concerns companies andorganizations that use Microsoft 365 and Defender to protect against malware or other threats. In customer support, Microsoft said that a certain attack surface reduction rule is causing problems. Earlier in the day, IT admins attempted to resolve the issue by setting the rule to “Block Win32 API calls from Office macro” audit only.

Microsoft says it has “brought back the rule.to prevent further impact while we conduct further investigation”. Several hours passed before Microsoft announced the full rollout of the fix at 4:46 pm ET.

The bad news is that the fixdoes not restore deleted shortcuts as described in Microsoft issue details. The problem affects thousands of computers in various organizations and has caused a lot of trouble for system administrators.

Regular Windows users and consumers are not affected by this strange bug, and it will only affect managed machines within organizations.