Republished on August 21 with Microsoft’s response to reports of failed PC SSDs
“Reset and recovery operations on some Windows versions might fail,” Microsoft has suddenly admitted, promising “an out-of-band update for the affected platforms to resolve this issue in the coming days.” That could be as soon as today.
Windows Latest reports the company “has warned millions of users on Windows 11 23H2/22H2 and Windows 10 against using the built-in Reset and Recovery feature.” Following the mandatory August security updates, PC users need to be careful.
Microsoft says after installing the update (KB5063875), “attempts to reset or recover the device might fail. This issue happens when users click to reset their PC, to fix problems using Windows Update or to RemoteWipe CSP.”
Windows 11 24H2 is unaffected, which will be welcome, but tens of millions of Windows 10 users who are still celebrating Microsoft’s u-turn on security support beyond October are impacted by this latest issue and need to await the emergency out-of-band-update.
Windows Latest warns “this is a critical issue, and Microsoft should have pulled the faulty Windows updates (KB5063875 and KB5063709).” The website reports “an emergency patch could drop as early as the afternoon of August 19. For 23H2, Microsoft is testing KB5066189, but it’s not yet live on Update Catalog or Windows Update.”
This comes as reports continue to roll in that another August update fail has been corrupting PC SSDs when writing large files. All told, a worrying time for users. And just weeks after Microsoft’s last broken Windows apology.
“While the feature is broken,” Windows Latest says, “Windows does not show any warnings that the recovery process would fail, so unless you’ve read this article or Microsoft’s documentation, you’ll never know that the Reset & Recovery features are not working and proceed with the Reset.” You really shouldn’t do that.
Update on August 20: Microsoft has now issued an emergency out-of-band update to fix this issue, confirming “tis issue was resolved in the out-of-band (OOB) update KB5066189. If your device is impacted by this issue, we recommend installing this out-of-band update instead of KB5063875.”
The Windows-maker tells users that “since this is a cumulative update, you do not need to apply any previous update before installing KB5066189, as it supersedes all previous updates for affected versions.”
While the update addresses the specific issue, “this update does not contain any additional security updates from those available in the August 2025 security update.”
When you apply the update tyour PC will “require a device restart. Microsoft also says that ”if your organization uses the affected platforms and hasn’t yet deployed the August 2025 security update yet, we recommend you apply this OOB update instead.”
Windows Latest confirms that “Today’s emergency updates are rolling out via Windows Update, fix issues with “Reset this PC” where the recovery process fails.”
Those updates are as follows:
- “Windows 11 23H2 KB5066189 (OS Builds 22621.5771 and 22631.5771) Out-of-band
- Windows 10 KB5066188 (OS Builds 19044.6218 and 19045.6218) Out-of-band.”
The other issue Microsoft has confirmed is under investigation is SSD drives failing when writing large files — again, post the recent August security update. The company tells me “we’re aware of these reports and are investigating with our partners.”
Windows Latest has delved into this reported issue, finding that “Windows 11 KB5063878 (Build 26100.4946) has a bug that causes the SSD to ‘vanish’ or the partition to show up as ‘RAW’, which means the storage might not appear in File Explorer (Windows) and even the BIOS. The issue can be reproduced during a perfect stress test when you meet certain criteria.”
It seems that some of these reported failures, which are inexplicably epicentered in Japan, point in the direction of Cyberpunk 2077 as a potential culprit. That’s not the case. The issue is the size of the files written to an SSD if it’s already under stress.
“That’s not an issue with Cyberpunk 2077 or other apps/games,” Windows Latest says. “The Windows 11 SSD failure issue showed up right after the Cyberpunk 2077 update because those game patches are huge and create a long, heavy write workload. And those types of operations expose Windows 11 24H2 to a bug that causes data corruption.” Thus the mixed messaging around the flaw.
We await the results of Microsoft’s investigation, while users are still being cautioned against writing very large files to SSDs, albeit a small selection of drives seems to be affected and most can be fully recovered with no data loss after a reboot.
“This bug has been reportedly introduced with Windows 11 KB5063878 (Build 26100.4946). You can verify the OS build from Settings > System > About.”
