Looks like the laptops are able to be recovered with a bit of finagling, so fortunately they haven't bricked everything.

And yeah staged updates or even just... some testing? Not sure how this one slipped through.

I don't think that's what's happening here. As far as I know it's an issue with a driver installed on the computers, not with anything trying to reach out to an external server. If that were the case you'd expect it to fail to boot any time you don't have an Internet connection.

Windows is bad but it's not that bad yet.