It's the second Tuesday of the month, and you know what that means. It's Patch Tuesday, the day that every supported Microsoft product gets updates. In the case of Windows 11, there's only one version to think about, version 21H2.

Unlike most months, but perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no preview update this month. This is almost definitely due to the fact the team was home for the holiday break. The Patch Tuesday update comes with a relatively short changelog, simply bundling in everything that was in the preview update. You might have expected them to be a bit longer this month since there was no preview update, but that's not the case.

If you're on Windows 11 version 21H2, you're going to get KB5009566, bringing the build number to 22000.434. You can manually download it here, and these are the highlights:

  • Updates a known issue that affects Japanese Input Method Editors (IME).  Text you enter might appear out of order or the text cursor might move unexpectedly in apps that use the multibyte character set (MBCS).

  • Updates security for your Windows operating system.

Here's the full list of fixes:

  • Addresses a known issue that affects Japanese Input Method Editors (IME). When you use a Japanese IME to enter text, the text might appear out of order or the text cursor might move unexpectedly in apps that use the multibyte character set (MBCS). This issue affects the Microsoft Japanese IME and third-party Japanese IMEs.

As is the case with all Patch Tuesday updates, this one is mandatory. That means that you can get it now by checking for updates in Windows Update or installing it manually, but if you don't, it's still going to install automatically at some point.

After this, there should be another preview update later in the month. These are usually referred to as 'C' and 'D' week updates, with the letter corresponding to the third and fourth week of the month. Unlike the Patch Tuesday updates, those are optional. They show up in Windows Update, but they don't get installed unless you explicitly ask for them.