On Wednesday, Microsoft fixed an issue that caused some Windows devices to install driver updates unexpectedly, despite policies configured to block automatic updates.
In an incident report published in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center (MO1332784), Microsoft said the issue was caused by a misconfiguration in the Windows Update caching service. The problem temporarily removed device registration information, causing some Windows systems to be treated as unregistered and preventing driver approval controls from being applied correctly.
The Intune support team also acknowledged the issue on Twitter and Reddit, stating that Microsoft was actively working on a fix.
“We’ve received a report of an issue where users’ Windows devices that have configured policies to prevent auto updates are installing drivers,” Microsoft said when it first acknowledged the problem on June 2.
“While working through mitigation, we identified that the drivers being installed are Microsoft-approved/signed and do not pose a security risk.”
Microsoft updated the affected caching services and restored device registration status on impacted systems to mitigate the issue. In a follow-up update on Wednesday, the company confirmed that the problem had been resolved.
“We’ve confirmed this issue is resolved after validating mitigation with a subset of previously affected users,” Microsoft added.
“We continue to investigate how this caching service temporarily removed Windows device registration information so we can better understand how to detect, prevent, and respond to similar service issues in the future.”
Although Microsoft has not disclosed how many customers or regions were affected, Windows administrators reported dealing with tens of thousands of devices that unexpectedly received BIOS and driver updates, which in many cases caused audio and video hardware to stop functioning properly.
