In the 3am 911 case, those admins could EASILY have cost LIVES with their decision. If that inbound call handler's machine had updates waiting, or more especially had any difficulty installing those updates, you could've had HOURS of downtime in a scenario where MINUTES mean life or death!
I guess my main point is that naivete like that is called criminal negligence and is punishable under the law in many cases. There may have been no malicious intent, but in a case so potentially catastrophic, it hardly matters, and if those admins didn't get into DEEP TROUBLE, they're either very lucky or your administrative discipline system is VERY broken.
And Microsoft is straying into similar territory with this whole thing.
And that's why a liaison from the "business" side of the organization should be in those meetings too.
This problem isn't new with Windows 10. It could have just as easily upgrade to a new Windows 7 patch which broke the product.
Every grantee and science group is different, and builds their boxes back in the States with varying levels of IT competence. Being a wizard in geothermal imaging doesn't mean you're a wizard in building Windows 10 boxes.
So there's all these varying groups (we support over 20 different science groups on our station alone) building their custom boxes on a variety of OS's and hardware to support all their strange sensors and equipment, and many of them are so specialized that no one is allowed to touch them. Nearly all science systems run Windows 7 or some flavor of Linux, and because there is literally YEARS of work leading up to one of these systems appearing on station, we are loath to touch them for fear of breaking some long-running or fragile science project.
In this situation I used my best judgement and determined that blocking Windows 10 would prevent more problems than it would cause for this group, and fortunately I was right.
The point I was trying to make is that the problem you're seeing isn't specific to Windows 10; it could have easily happened on Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1 instead.
Our commander talked to their commander, I'm sure at least one finger was wagged at them in disapproval.
If a computer system is so mission-critical that it should never updated, well, Windows has a setting for that-- so turn it on!
Anecdote: When I worked dispatch, the local Network Operations Center pushed out an update that forcibly rebooted all of our Windows workstations...including the machine that ran inbound emergency calls. The admins at the NOC didn't think that anyone would dial 911 at three in the morning. No malfeasance, but a simple lack of foresight.