This may be winter damage or it may be boxwood blight, a disease caused by a fungus. It’s usually impossible to tell from a photograph, and sometimes damage on boxwood is a combination of winter injury and a fungal disease. Boxwoods are susceptible to several fungal diseases. We suggest you snip a few twigs, both healthy and not, and bring them in a sealed bag to your local county extension office for further identification. They may recommend you remove the afflicted branches to avoid spreading the disease.
If you can’t take the plants into an extension service, prune out all stems that the bark has peeled from and shear the plants back by an inch or two to stimulate new growth, then wait and see what happens this spring and early summer. Fungicides do not cure boxwood blight.
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