Windows Update will soon automatically roll back faulty drivers

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FollowSee All MicrosoftWindows Update will soon automatically roll back faulty driversMicrosoft is making Windows Update a lot less disruptive. Microsoft is making Windows Update a lot less disruptive. by Tom Warren Tom WarrenSenior CorrespondentPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Technical Details

FollowSee All by Tom WarrenMay 14, 2026, 9:40 AM UTC Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Tom Warren Tom WarrenPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All by Tom Warren is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Microsoft is on a mission to fix Windows 11, and part of that involves improving the often-frustrating Windows Update experience.

While you’ll soon be able to pause updates indefinitely, Microsoft is also adding a new feature that automatically rolls back problematic drivers that have been installed through Windows Update. Microsoft has created a new “Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery” feature that can replace a faulty driver installed on a PC with a previously working driver through Windows Update. Right now, Windows 11 users have to manually roll back a driver or hardware vendors have to publish a new one to work around any problems, but this new feature aims to make this process automatic.

“When a driver is identified as having quality issues during our shiproom evaluation process, Microsoft can now initiate a recovery action from the cloud, replacing the problematic driver on affected devices without requiring manual intervention from the user or the hardware partner,” explains Garrett Duchesne, principal program manager at Microsoft. This new Windows Update is currently being tested with Microsoft’s hardware partners and should start gradually rolling out in September. Microsoft is also making Windows updates less disruptive, with the ability to extend a pause date as many times as you need, skip updates during initial device setup, and restart or shutdown a PC without having to install a pending update.

Industry Implications

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This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.