I love to shit on Microsoft as much as the next lemming, but this error message is way out of context. This was a bug in the January quality update (quality lol), and has been addressed.
Okay but why was there functionality in place for this to break in the first place? Notepad shouldn’t need the store involved at all and why are they pushing our bugs like this that should be caught in testing.
My guess? Because they fired a shitload of engineers and are having the remaining ones pick up the slack with AI vibe coding. They are pushing slop to prod and breaking shit left and right because they need to prove that destroying the world with AI data centers is worth it.
Spoiler altert: it’s not. Having well trained and talented engineers wite the code works better.
Oh good that’s much better, at first I thought they were requiring notepad to be online, but they’re just ruining the OS and world with vibe coded slop? Well that’s fine!
I love to shit on Microsoft as much as the next lemming, but this error message is way out of context. This was a bug in the January quality update (quality lol), and has been addressed.
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/01/24/microsoft-admits-it-accidentially-crashed-apps-like-notepad-paint-snipping-tool-on-windows-11-rolls-out-a-fix/
Windows doesn’t require you to sign into the MS store to use notepad or paint.
Source: end user compute engineer who had to deal with this shit.
Okay but why was there functionality in place for this to break in the first place? Notepad shouldn’t need the store involved at all and why are they pushing our bugs like this that should be caught in testing.
My guess? Because they fired a shitload of engineers and are having the remaining ones pick up the slack with AI vibe coding. They are pushing slop to prod and breaking shit left and right because they need to prove that destroying the world with AI data centers is worth it.
Spoiler altert: it’s not. Having well trained and talented engineers wite the code works better.
Oh good that’s much better, at first I thought they were requiring notepad to be online, but they’re just ruining the OS and world with vibe coded slop? Well that’s fine!
Because enterprise is Microslop’s real customer, and the consumer is the QA now.
Oh, I know. The point was that the comment I responded to isn’t a valid excuse.
I’m not saying it’s a valid excuse, and I’m certainly not jumping to defend Microsoft. All I’m saying is the screenshot/post is misleading.
It happened to me while trying to use the shipping tool, an hour before a presentation.
Fortunately I was able to record the screen and extract a frame as a still.
“quality update”