Newsletter Archives

• And now we know why the Win10 version 1809 updates got blocked

  Posted on February 5, 2019 at 08:12 CST by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Last night, Microsoft officially announced the reason why its Win10 version 1809 cumulative updates were having problems. Remember the Update Servers having hiccups? Yeah, that’s the bug.

  Here’s the official reason:

  February 4, 2019 9:45 PM PST

  “The Windows Update service was impacted by a data corruption issue in an external DNS service provider global outage on January 29, 2019. The issue was resolved on the same day and Windows Update is now operating normally, but a few customers have continued to report issues connecting to the Windows Update service. We expect these issues will go away as downstream DNS servers are updated with the corrected Windows Update DNS entries.”

  It only took ’em a week.

  There’s a reason why the patching team has a PR group. Just wish they’d do more, you know, PR.

  UPDATE: Interesting. Just looking at it, this notice only appears for Win10 version 1809 updates (presumably cumulative updates). But I’m about 99% sure the hiccups were being experienced with all Windows versions. Can anyone confirm?

  Windows Patches/Security Windows Update server

• The Windows Update servers are having hiccups

  Posted on January 31, 2019 at 08:22 CST by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Bogdan Popa at Softpedia has the skinny.

  It looks like many DNS servers are mis-routing Windows Update connections. At this point, it looks like the problem ISN’T with Microsoft.

  Bogdan’s solution is to use the Google DNS server. A bit of irony in that, but hey, if it works….

  Thanks to @b for pointing it out to me:

  I’ve been unable to connect to Windows Update for the last 12 hours via Comcast in US, but I can reach Windows Update after connecting via VPN.

  The method for changing DNS servers varies depending on which version of Windows you’re using, and whether you’re on a wired (Ehternet) or wireless (W-Fi) connection. For Win10 users, do this:

  Step 1. Click Start > Settings > Network & Internet >Ethernet > Change adapter settings. (If you’re connected via Wi-Fi, click Wi-Fi > Change adapter options.)

  Step2. Right-click on your adapter (if you have a Hyper-V virtual switch set up, that’s the one you want), choose Properties, then double-click Internet Protocol Version 4. You see a dialog box like this one:

  

  Step 3. Depending on which DNS server you trust, enter 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 to use Cloudflare’s DNS server. Or you can use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 for Google’s, or 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 for OpenDNS’s.

  Step 4. Click OK and, for peace of mind, reboot. (It should work if you just restart your browser, but if you have many browsers open, hey, it won’t hurt.)

  UPDATE: Looks like the problem was solved overnight.

  Microsoft News Windows Update server