Notepad, Snipping Tool, other apps broken by new bug in Windows 11

We recently wrote about a Patch Tuesday bug causing apps to go unresponsive if they interact with cloud storage services. This was the latest addition in the long list of bugs caused by Patch Tuesday in the past week or so, impacting Remote Desktop, hibernation and shutdown behavior, and Outlook. Now, Windows 11 users are reporting a new issue that renders several apps useless.

Windows Central has highlighted forum threads over on Reddit and Microsoft support forums where tons of users are unable to open certain apps like Notepad, Snipping Tool, Alienware Command Center, and Xbox Ally and ROG Ally Armoury Crate apps, among others.

Customers are being greeted with error code 0x803F8001, noting that the app is not available for their account and they should make sure that they are signed in. This leaves users unable to utilize their desired apps, which can have impacts on productivity too, considering that Notepad is also among the list of impacted apps.

On the Microsoft support thread, an independent advisor has indicated that this error code is typically thrown when the Microsoft Store cannot validate app licenses, sometimes due to a corrupted cache. While this would indicate that if you reset the store cache, or uninstall and reinstall the app, you should be able to get rid of the error, this is not the case in Windows Central's testing. For the media outlet, installing the latest Patch Tuesday update (KB5074109) fixed the issue, but this has not been confirmed to be a reliable fix either.

We have not been able to reproduce the bug on our side, so the exact impact and scope of the problem is unclear. It's also unknown if it was triggered due to a Windows update or a bug in Microsoft servers. Regardless, it's been reported that Microsoft is aware of the issue so we should expect a fix to land soon.

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Posted Thursday 22 January 2026 at 6:09 pm AEST (my time).

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