Don't panic if Windows 11's April update reboots loads of times - it should install fine in the end by all accounts

There are some oddities with the latest update for Windows 11, and that includes a series of reboots that may have you worrying that something's gone wrong with the upgrade.

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The good news is that it hasn't, but there is a genuine concern, or indeed two, with the April update for Windows 11, and that includes a (recurring) problem with BitLocker.

Windows Latest flagged these issues, and observed that the patch for April, which is KB5083769, requires an unusual number of reboots.

The tech site said that during the update, they sat through no fewer than four additional reboots (on top of the initial restart to install KB5083769) before the process completed (though it did eventually finish okay).

I can empathize that after a few reboots, you're going to start worrying that something has gone badly wrong, and that you may end up with a nasty error of some kind (or indeed be left in a boot loop).

This might be some kind of bug, it isn't clear, but it happened to Windows Latest on two separate PCs, and their report observes that other Windows 11 users have encountered this too.

If not a glitch, it might be down to a separate .NET Framework update that's been deployed at the same time. (Although even then, this seems like excessive restarting behavior - I don't think I've ever encountered more than a couple of extra reboots at most with a normal monthly patch).

Microsoft is investigating this issue, we're told.

As for the BitLocker problem, this leaves you staring at the recovery screen, and if you don't have your recovery key to hand, then you're in trouble. This bug has been popping up with some regularity over the past year or so, sadly, and doesn't yet appear to have been vanquished.

Fortunately, Microsoft has rolled out a server-side fix for this glitch.

Death loop nastiness

Neowin also separately reported that a few Windows 11 users have encountered a 'death loop' with this update, as per a post on Microsoft's Learn portal. This involves a crash with a 'mosaic of weird pixels' which is followed by a blue screen stating that Windows needs to be recovered. If recovery is attempted, however, the PC goes into a boot loop, and the same corrupt screen manifests again.

That does sound very concerning, but at the moment there's only a scattering of reports as noted, so I wouldn't worry overly about it until we see more evidence of this loop occurring across more Windows 11 devices.

As ever, it pays to have a somewhat cautious approach to Windows 11 updates, and I never leap on them immediately upon release. Microsoft is soon going to give us more control over delaying them for much longer. Currently, at least on Windows 11 Home, you can only pause an update for five weeks maximum.