If you have ever second-guessed the fact that you clicked on the “Update and Shut Down” button on your Windows machine but it ended up restarting instead, that’s not on you – it was indeed a bug, and one that remained long enough that it took Microsoft a whole decade to finally fix the issue.
Update And Shut Down Bug Addressed: Microsoft
This fact was only briefly mentioned by Microsoft in its support article for the KB5067036 update for Windows 11 25H2 and Windows 11 24H2 PCs, which states:
Improved: Addressed underlying issue which can cause “Update and shutdown” to not actually shut down your PC after updating.
So, you can be sure that once you click “Update and Shut Down” button, the system will do exactly as told (no luck for Windows 10 PCs, as the operating system has reached end-of-life status). That being said, why has this bug existed for so long in the first place? Microsoft didn’t give any answers, but Windows Latest theorized that “there’s a chance it was a race condition or an issue with the Windows Servicing Stack.”
More specifically, a Windows Update process usually involves installing the said update, then performing a system reboot to replace critical system files during the offline servicing phase, since these files are in use when the Windows operating system is running normally. That’s why you may see the system, under normal updating conditions, reboot briefly then shuts itself down right after.
In this case, a shutdown command likely was lost during in the reboot process, which caused the system to reboot and do nothing afterward. An alternative theory involves a “race condition”, where code paths ended up ‘racing’ each other causing incorrect execution orders (the publication pointed out that features like Fast Startup could’ve caused conflicts with the process). This likely triggered an unexpected condition in the system, causing the system to do nothing after the restart as well.
Pokdepinion: I actually witnessed this bug happening in my Windows 10 PC before, although I already developed a habit of monitoring the update process so it didn’t affect me as much.
