I don't know if it was deliberately set to block webcams and mics or not, but it does so
by default after the update. In my opinion, if they were going to do this on purpose (for security reasons), I think they should have provided a huge notice of warning to users that their mics & cams would be blocked by default in the Privacy settings. They didn't. It left me (and I'm sure 1000's of others) scrambling for several days trying to figure out what was wrong. I use my webcam daily.
I finally got my answer [
here]. That's me on there (Garden3519). I think that was about 48 hours after the update was released. I even did a "roll back" on my laptop to make sure webcam worked on the old Windows, it did.
If you look at that [
forum], you'll see alot of activity right after the new Win update. Before that, not so much. For every 1 person that posts a question there's probably many more who didn't want to sign up and post a question. My point is, this new Privacy setting caused alot of problems for alot of people. Many people don't use a mic/webcam daily so those people will discover a few weeks / months later that theirs aren't working and wonder why.
I also created [
this Tutorial].
There's also driver issues with soundcards / microphones that are causing other people problems, I don't want to dismiss that. That could be the problem the OP (original poster) here had.
Sorry for the rant at Microsoft, I hope the OP gets their problem fixed.