Microsoft has quietly stopped the rollout of its latest update to Windows 10, the October 2018 Update. The company kicked off the update’s rollout earlier this week at its New York event. The rollout started off fairly well, though some users started reporting major issues with the update.

One of those major issues includes deletion of users’ personal files stored in folders like Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos. Once the update is installed, these files are being completely removed for some of the users, and there also isn’t any way of recovering them — at least for the time being. Other users are reporting issues with Microsoft’s Edge browser as well, though that’s not as major as personal files being deleted.

Microsoft is now recommending users to not install the October 2018 Update until the company finds a fix for the issue. “We have paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating,” the company mentioned in a support document. Although Microsoft is only now acknowledging the issue, Windows Insiders have been reporting the bug for months on the Feedback Hub app.

It is unclear exactly how many users are affected by the issue, though that’s likely to be on the low levels mainly because Microsoft is rolling the update out in phases. The issue also doesn’t seem to be affecting every user that upgrades to the October 2018 Update, making it increasingly difficult for Microsoft to mitigate the problem.

Microsoft will likely roll out a fix for the issue as early as next week, resuming the rollout once again, though that’s yet to be confirmed. The October 2018 Update, in my experience, has been one of the more unstable feature updates for the OS in the recent times, and the latest incident just proves that yet again.

Thanks for the tip, Scott!

Tagged with Windows 10 October 2018 Update, Windows 10 Version 1709