Elasticsearch 2.4.1, a bugfix release based on Lucene 5.5.2, has been announced, addressing several significant issues and is now available on Elastic Cloud. Users, particularly those on Windows or using X-Pack, are encouraged to upgrade due to critical fixes that include correcting a bug in the Windows startup script, which previously used an inefficient garbage collector for the multithreaded application. Other notable fixes involve resolving an exception with the Flush API that mistakenly triggered shard recoveries, correcting a bug in Watcher that caused loss of custom cluster state data, and allowing watches to be deleted or updated during execution, which was previously hindered by the new reporting feature. Full details of these changes are available in the release notes, and feedback is welcomed through Elastic's Twitter or forums, with issues reportable on GitHub.