According to FlightStats and FlightRadar24, the original plane was a Boeing 777-206 from 2003, which has been replaced by a 777-300 from 2023. It’s en route now over the Atlantic.
So an issue caused by Boeing’s recent series of quality problems seems unlikely, unless there was a dodgy spare part involved.
FWIW, you can still press Shift-F10 to open a command prompt, then run
oobe\bypassnro
. The computer will reboot / restart the setup process and this time there’ll be a small link “I don’t have internet” that’ll allow you to set up a local account.Just make very sure not to connect it to the internet (cable or Wi-Fi) before this point.
There have been rumours of newer versions of Windows 11 not allowing the bypass anymore, but I haven’t personally seen any evidence of this so far.
Still a shit show though - trickery like this shouldn’t be necessary.