14 DAY TRIAL // UPDATE, December 21: Microsoft has acknowledged KB4054517 issues and offered a workaround. Read more about this here. Original story below.
Microsoft rolled out a new set of cumulative updates a few hours ago as part of its Patch Tuesday cycle, and although everything seemed to be running smoothly at first, it now looks like some devices powered by Windows 10 Fall Creators Update are getting the typical failing to install error.
Posts on Microsoft’s Community forums point to the same problem, with one thread having more than 30 “I have the same question” hits. While this doesn’t seem to be an indicator of a widespread issue, it’s a sign that the update still fails to install in some cases, though it’s not clear why.
Corrupted files
One of the users who reported the problem claims Windows 10 cumulative update KB4054517 fails to install with error code 0x80070643, with the typical workarounds not making any difference. These include Windows Update Troubleshooter and rebooting the system.
“The only thing we've discovered so far is that this machine will not display our other 3 PC's on the network when we select ‘Network’ in File Explorer. But all three other PC's can ‘see’ and access this PC no problem. And we ran a batch backup job on the affected PC and it was able to copy files from all three other PC's. So it's just a display problem in File Explorer -> Network,” one user explained.
It appears that the other updates released by Microsoft on Patch Tuesday, including the Adobe Flash Player patch, installed correctly with no errors whatsoever.
For the time being, it seems this is the only cumulative update released this Patch Tuesday that causes issues to users. Microsoft hasn’t acknowledged the bugs, but most likely the company is investigating to determine the cause of the problem.
A Microsoft engineer said on the linked thread that this error could be caused by corrupted components or files and restoring the PC from a restore point could fix it.