“Critical Error: Start Menu and Cortana aren't working”

Aug 4, 2015 05:01 GMT  ·  By

The Start menu made its grand return in Windows 10, alongside Cortana, one of the biggest additions to the operating system, but although Microsoft launched both of them with much fanfare, it turns out that many users are actually experiencing issues when trying to launch them.

Reports published on support forums and on Microsoft’s very own Community service reveal that, in most of the cases, the Start menu and Cortana fail to launch with an error reading “Critical Error: Start menu and Cortana aren’t working. We’ll try to fix it the next time you sign in.”

Rebooting the computer, refreshing it, creating a new account, and all the other workarounds found online don’t seem to make a difference for the majority of users, but Microsoft has already acknowledged the problem and promised a fix very soon.

Here’s how one of the affected users described the problem:

“My wife had the same problem with her Toshiba after one day working good. Followed screen prompts with same results, shut down, same results, tried 3 more times (slow to learn I guess) then tried F8-Safe mode which did not look like it was responding but after next restart - Start and Cortana returned.”

Microsoft: We’re working on it

Right now, a Microsoft engineer says that the company is looking into reports and trying to develop a fix, but no timing has been provided for the time being.

“We've fixed many of the underlying causes for this issue, but there are still some eluding us, and I'm sorry to hear that this is impacting you guys. We have telemetry and crash reports that we're watching for this, but it always helps when we hear from you guys directly in case there are extra details that might help,” she points out.

So for the moment, if you’re experiencing the same behavior, just try to file in a report and let Microsoft know about the bug. This should help the company provide a fix a little bit faster if more information is available.