The problem wasn’t with an update Microsoft pushed out. It was due to an update by crowdstrike which iirc ignored all settings for staged rollout (or there were no settings at all for that)
It’s not like anyone outside Crowdstrike chooses to have these updates installed. It happened automatically with no way of stopping it.
Yes, this specific problem wasn’t caused by Microsoft, but it was caused by the forced automatic update policy that crowdstrike has, which is the same behavior Windows has. So while this time it wasn’t Microsoft, next time it could be. And while you can prevent this from happening on your Linux box by choosing software that doesn’t do this, it’s impossible to prevent it on a Windows box because the OS itself does it.
You absolutely can (and should) do staged rollout for windows updates.
Source: We do that at work. We have 3 different patch groups. 1 “bleeding edge”, 1 delay by a day or two, and another one delayed by a bit more. This so so we can stop an update from rolling out to prod if dev breaks.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but others have told me that Microsoft reserves the right to push security upgrades that bypass any policy setup by the network administrator.