Out of the loop

For context, I do not work in anything remotely close to an IT department. I work in a hospital. This affected my work the other day too. I am a bit more tech savvy than some of my coworkers, so I was attempting to see if I could fix the issue on my own by reverting to the previous windows update in recovery mode.

However, doing so prompted me for a Windows product key, which I obviously didn't have because I didn't install Windows on that computer.

The IT department had to come around individually for every single affected computer. They had to manually look up and type out the unique Windows product key for every single affected computer in order to be able to fix the problem.

Not sure if most installs of Windows act that way or not, but it definitely made the process more manual and annoying than it had to be. I have no idea why many of the recovery options required me to look up and enter a Windows product key. Seemed very odd to me and just made the ordeal more manual and time consuming than it had to be.

I believe some hospitals even ended up having to cancel surgeries.