That's just P* poor quality and lack of care at Microsoft. When I think of automatic updates, I am thinking about automatic security updates on Ubuntu server. I'm sure canonical will screw things up at some point as well though.

I guess it is easy and tempting to say "just turn it off and on again" on consumer electronics and end user computers. :/

Why would an application become non-functional when an update is pending? Perhaps a critical security vulnerability?