I have seen this issue when our server farm vms all lost power yesterday and couldn't find a way to stop it from happening.
I have got multiple nodes using shared configuration in a shared folder. When the shared configuration was exported, it was encrypted (you have to so that you can click on the OK button).
And all nodes were working well until yesterday they've all lost power accidentally. Then I noticed that all application pools on all nodes are stopped. When digging up the root cause, I found both WAS service and W3SVC service couldn't start because reading the shared configuration failed.
The only way I found to fix it was to change the shared configuration path a little bit and change back (adding a space then delete), and then apply. I will get the pop up to type in the encryption password again. After that, I have to do this on each of the nodes! Plus manually start WAS and W3SVC services, start all application pools, start all websites on each node! This is just ridiculous!
I'm not sure whether I'm seeing just a rare case. Has anyone seen this before? But definitely I don't want to do that again if the power is gone again. Anyway to prevent the encryption password used by IIS from getting lost? Thanks.