Microsoft says the issue is caused by the latest updates

Jun 24, 2020 17:50 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has recently acknowledged another bug in Windows 10, explaining that it’s caused by the latest cumulative updates for the operating system.

More specifically, the company says that after you install the May and June 2020 update, there’s a chance that the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service, also known as LSASS, could fail on some devices, eventually forcing a reboot of the computer.

The error that the impacted devices would get is the following:

“A critical system process, C:\WINDOWS\system32\lsass.exe, failed with status code c0000008. The machine must now be restarted.”

There are several things that you need to know about this problem.

First and foremost, the issue seems to be hitting all recent versions of Windows 10 – as a matter of fact, Microsoft has already acknowledged the error on version 2004, or the May 2020 Update.

Then, the issue isn’t caused by the June updates, but they seem to be related to the May 2020 Patch Tuesday fixes that the company released last month.

The first user report pointing to this error showed up on Microsoft’s support forums in late May, so the problem occurred before the company shipped the June updates. Someone explained on the forums that the error was also encountered on devices running Windows 10 version 1809 (October 2018 Update) and these were all forced to reboot just after logging into the operating system.

“I have several users got the same issue after this month's patches installed. Exactly the same error message in Event log. The patches we installed are: KB4551853 & KB4556441. We're still looking for a resolution,” one IT admin explains on the forums.

“We have some machines on our domain that's crashing upon login. They get the ‘Your PC Will Automatically Restart in One Minute’ then they are forced to restart. After the restart, they're able to login again and continue working until the next day,” someone else adds.

Microsoft says it’s already working on a fix, but for the time being, there’s no ETA as to when this one could land. Most likely, we’ll have to wait until the next Patch Tuesday updates go live for a full fix.

Meanwhile, it looks like the software giant has already developed a fix, and it’s testing it privately with a number of companies that received it. According to these testers, the fix indeed does its job and everything is running correctly after installing it.

“MS provided us with a private hotfix for limited testing for a few days that seems to have resolved the issue. However, it is not included in June Tuesday patches. Microsoft Support has now informed us that the fix is tentatively scheduled for July’s patch release cycle,” someone explains.

Meanwhile, the easiest way to prevent the bug from being triggered is to just avoid using the shutdown feature. One IT admin says users who instead put their computers to sleep no long encounter the issue, with the reboot no longer occurring when going back to the desktop.

On the other hand, some say that disabling the Fast Startup option is what’s solving the problem, so you could very well give a try to this one too.

For the time being, what we know for sure is that Microsoft is still investigating, so a fix is supposed to come sooner or later. In addition to the workarounds mentioned above, you can also try removing the most recent cumulative updates for Windows 10, although this isn’t the recommended way to go given that these updates typically bring critical security fixes.