Microsoft claims Windows 11 is innocent of killing SSDs – but the mystery continues
- Microsoft has finished its investigation into reports of an SSD-breaking bug
- The company said the August update for Windows 11 isn’t to blame
- There are still reports of drive failures filtering in, though, and some folks aren’t happy with Microsoft’s conclusion
Microsoft has been investigating reports of the most recent Windows 11 update breaking some SSDs, and we now have the results of that endeavor – and the company found the August patch for the OS isn’t to blame.
Bleeping Computer reports that Microsoft posted a service alert on its admin center (a link that can’t be reached for normal Microsoft accounts, only business accounts) stating the following: “After thorough investigation, Microsoft has found no connection between the August 2025 Windows security update and the types of hard drive failures reported on social media.”
Microsoft added: “As always, we continue to monitor feedback after the release of every Windows update, and will investigate any future reports.”
Note that Microsoft mentions “hard drive failures”, and this is because the problem has hit hard disks too, based on reports – although the majority of incidents have affected SSDs.
Microsoft has worked with its partners in investigating the issue, including SSD (and hard drive) makers as you might expect, but collaboratively they’ve turned up no evidence of a connection between the most recent update for Windows 11 24H2 and the reported drive failures.
Indeed, we already heard directly from Phison, which makes controllers for SSDs which reports have suggested are more likely to be involved in these failures, refuting that notion, and stating clearly that it couldn’t reproduce the bug (across 4,500 hours of testing).
Microsoft further clarifies that its Windows 11 telemetry – diagnostic data taken from computers running its OS – doesn’t show any evidence of an increase in drive failures, either.
Analysis: coincidence and ‘natural’ drive failures – or something else?
In short: there’s nothing to see here, move along. Based on Microsoft’s investigation – which took a while, so I’m assuming went into some depth (Phison’s certainly did) – the Windows 11 August update is not responsible for breaking SSDs or hard drives (and neither are Phison controllers).
The problem is that there are still a fair few Windows 11 users posting across online forums, such as Reddit, insisting that they’ve had their SSD sunk by this most recent update for Windows 11. Then again, there are others posting about managing fleets of PCs and seeing nothing with this cumulative update having been applied – not even a hint of a drive failure across those computers.
So, what’s going on? One theory being aired is that it could be coincidence – drive failures happen all the time, and so in any given week, some Windows 11 PCs will see some breakages in this respect. And because there are reports of the August update being the problem, folks will assume that it’s at fault, when it isn’t.
However, you could certainly argue that there are too many reports for this to be a comfortable conclusion. Furthermore, if it was a case of erroneously pinning natural drive failures down to the issue, it would also point to older hardware being affected – as failures are more likely to happen with aged SSDs – but there are reports of new (or nearly new) drives getting hit by this bug.
There is another possibility here that, even given Microsoft’s statement that there’s nothing overtly wrong with Windows 11, there could still be something about the August update – buried deep, perhaps – that’s somehow making a hardware fault in certain drives more likely to occur. In other words, this wouldn’t necessarily be Microsoft’s fault, but it might still relate indirectly to the update.
However, with Microsoft and Phison seemingly unable to reproduce the bug over a whole load of testing, this seems rather unlikely. Which brings us back round to: what’s going on with these reports still trickling out? There’s no clear answer here, but there are clearly some unhappy people posting online about their SSD woes.
It’s worth going back over the apparent cause of the bug, which is initiating a large file copy – like a game installation, for example. As Bleeping Computer points out, the glitch seems to be more likely to happen if your drive is over half full (60% or more). Going by reports, the affected SSD is vanishing off the system – though in some cases it returns after a simple reboot (in others, it doesn’t, which is obviously a big headache).
Windows 11 Home users can only put off installing a cumulative update for a short while, so they’re going to get it piped through to their machine eventually, if they’ve been trying to avoid it. At that point, it’s up to the individual user how confident they feel if they want to carry out a hefty file operation like the installation of a chunky game or app. If they’re still paranoid, and their drive is nearly full, they might just want to play it safe for now.
Microsoft notes it may “investigate any future reports”, so we may yet hear more from the company; but for the time being, it appears to want to draw a line under the matter. And for now, we have to trust the conclusions of Microsoft and Phison – although evidently there are people out there who remain skeptical, and feel that we still haven’t got to the bottom of this episode.
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