Your USB speakers went silent this week. Microsoft has now confirmed why.

Plug in the speakers and nothing happens. The volume slider does nothing. Device Manager shows a yellow triangle and the words "This device cannot start (Code 10)". If that started on your PC in the last few days, you did not break anything. The September update did.

Microsoft opened the issue on its Windows release health dashboard at 18:36 Pacific on 11 September and marked it confirmed within the hour. The cause is KB5124008, the 8 September security update, and the hardware affected is anything built to the USB Audio Class 1.0 standard. In practice that means a lot of ordinary and older kit: USB headsets, desk speakers, small mixers, the cheap adapter that came with a monitor. Windows 11 24H2, 25H2 and 26H1 are all on the list. Servers are not, which is no consolation if the thing that died is the headset you take calls on.

The symptoms are not consistent, which is part of why it took a few days to pin down. Some people get the Code 10 error. Some get silence with no error at all. Some find the volume controls unresponsive or pinned at zero, and others find the device works normally in plain stereo but goes quiet the moment 8-channel or 3D audio is involved. That last group has something to try: switch the device to 2-channel in Sound settings and the audio comes back for many of them. Microsoft says a resolution is being worked on and has named no date.

Uninstalling KB5124008 is a poor trade, since it carries the 966 security fixes from this month's Patch Tuesday including two Windows holes already under attack. And this is not a driver fault, so reinstalling audio drivers will not help. If you do end up experimenting anyway, Tendvane can back up your current drivers to a folder first, which turns getting back to the set that worked into a single import rather than an evening of hunting through manufacturer websites.