“We apologize for the inconvenience,” the company says

Nov 25, 2015 05:36 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has just provided us with a statement to explain what exactly happened during the weekend when it decided to remove Windows 10 Threshold 2 ISOs completely and make this new OS update available exclusively via Windows Update.

While some speculated that the reason behind this decision was actually related to activation problems, Microsoft claims that it has nothing to do with this, but with some privacy settings that have been reset once users upgraded with the official ISOs.

According to the company, if you disabled some privacy options in Windows 10 before updating, once Threshold 2 was up and running, it automatically enabled them back so some of your information was collected even if you specifically configured not to.

“We’ll restore privacy settings for everyone”

Redmond claims it all happened accidentally, and now that Windows 10 Threshold 2 ISOs are again available for download, everything should be back to normal.

Additionally, the company will release updates to fix privacy settings for everyone impacted by this bug, as some users might still be unaware of the changes Threshold 2 made to their privacy settings.

“Recently we learned of an issue that could have impacted an extremely small number of people who had already installed Windows 10 and applied the November update. Once these customers installed the November update, a few of their settings preferences may have inadvertently not been retained. For these customers, we will restore their settings over the coming days, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We worked to resolve the issue as quickly as possible - it will not impact future installs of the November update, which is available today,” a Microsoft spokesperson told us this morning.

The options in question are advertising ID, background apps, SmartScreen Filter, and Sync with devices, so if you previously set these to off and upgraded to Threshold 2, make sure they are still off now.