Surface RT owners back in business as Windows 8.1 RT officially returns

Microsoft Surface RT
Cheer up, Windows 8.1 RT is back!

After pulling a problematic update for Surface RT owners last weekend, Microsoft has addressed the issue, and users can get back to updating to the latest and greatest version of Windows RT.

Microsoft has once again released the Windows 8.1 RT update to its Windows Store, this time addressing installation problems that were plaguing some users.

Over the weekend, Microsoft yanked the update just two days after launching it on October 17, citing "a rare situation" on its community support forum.

The problem appeared only to affect Surface RT tablets, which became bricked when the original update failed to complete.

Troubled boot

Microsoft confirmed on October 21 that the problem affected only a small fraction of Surface RT users - one out of every 1,000, to be exact.

"This was due to a rare situation where firmware updates had not completed at the time of the update to RT 8.1. In most cases, if a customer encountered this issue, the result was simply an extra reboot. However, for a very small percentage, the boot configuration data was affected, which prevented a successful boot," Microsoft said in a statement.

Affected users can get back up to speed by using the recovery solution Microsoft released yesterday, a 3.7GB image that will return bricked Surface RT tablets to life.

Perhaps not so ironically, today also marks the release of Microsoft's second-generation Surface 2 and Surface 2 Pro, which comes out of the box already running the latest Windows 8.1 software.

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Via CNET