Many Windows 10 Users Unable To Connect To Windows Update Service (bleepingcomputer.com)

For the past two days, some Windows 10 users from around the world have been reporting that they are unable to connect to Windows Update. When they attempt to do so, Windows 10 will complain that they are unable to connect to the update service. From a report: We first learned about this problem yesterday when our member Opera contacted us stating that they, and many others, were having issues connecting to Windows Update. When they tried updating, Windows would report that it could not connect to the update service. The wording of the error, shown below, indicates that this is an Internet connectivity issue, but others are not so sure. "We couldn't connect to the update service. We'll try again later, or you can check now. If it still doesn't work, make sure you're connected to the Internet" Unfortunately, there is no clear cut answer as to what is causing this issue and some feel it is related to a botched Windows Defender update and others state that this could be a DNS issue.

Comments

They didn't pay their internet bill

[pgmrdlm]

Just did updates with my windows 10 machine yesterday

Don't fix!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully they won't fix this, sounds like a god-send.

Re:Don't fix!

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 2000 was better.

Honestly Windows 2000 with 7's UAC admin-escalation, user mode drivers, and modern direct X would be fantastic.

Everything else they've added has been regressive.

Let's call that group the lucky ones

[Anonymous Coward]

They win!

Re:Let's call that group the lucky ones

[quenda]

In unrelated news, PC uptime and productivity sets record high.

What's the issue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds ideal to me!

Re:What's the issue?

[Jetstream]

Defender is doing its job then. It's protecting Windows machines from MS updates!

Lame error messages

[hiroshimarrow]

If MS were to write error messages that meant anything, people might know more about what the problem is. But having a core (and forced) component of the OS telling someone they are offline just because the update server can't be seen is nonsense. Half their messages are meaningless garbage now, trying not to scare the layperson, and helping the professional even less with each new iteration.

Re:Lame error messages

[az-saguaro]

Agree, and it's not just the error messages. Ask tech support for help, and it's the same lameness. Go to an MS support forum, and their "experts" know less than a third grader, just enough to read the scripts.

MS has never bothered to provide meaningful support for its users. Remember, you are a user, not a customer. The customers are the hardware OEM's who buy Windows to put on the machines, not you the end user who paid money to the OEM but not to MS, so why should MS care.

The disturbing thing is to think that those inept user interactions might reflect how things work in general throughout the organization.

Oh please ... as if error message helps ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The wording of the error, shown below, indicates that this is an Internet connectivity issue, but others are not so sure. "We couldn't connect to the update service. We'll try again later, or you can check now. If it still doesn't work, make sure you're connected to the Internet"

Seriously, are these people thinking they're going to understand the problem from reading the error message?

Microsoft has dumbed down error messages to the point they don't actually say anything, at that point it's a "for instance".

Like their useless wizards that say "Windows is looking for a solution to your problem" and then just eventually times out and points you to the on-line help ... those wizards have never solved a problem, and the error messages aren't based on anything other than "what is the least scary message we can present to the user?"

That entire message boils down to something bad happened, maybe the internet is broke. It has about as much diagnostic value as a fart in a windstorm.

Why is anybody pretending those messages have conveyed any useful information in years? Because, really, they haven't.

Wow, so this is, what, 3 days and 3 major outages of MS online shit? My how they're sucking these days.

Bet you anything

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The Windows telemetry on the other hand probably has no trouble connecting whatsoever.

Re:Bet you anything

[ljw1004]

The Windows telemetry on the other hand probably has no trouble connecting whatsoever.

I'd hope so! Because if it couldn't, then everyone at Microsoft would be running completely blind as to whether people are running into this problem and in what number. It's only with telemetry that they can figure out what group of people are affected and go from there to a cause.

(They could try to figure out who's affected without telemetry, solely by going from feedback that people themselves write on twitter or forum posts. But that's always a lower-quality signal, and would overrepresent tech-savy folks).

I'm quite serious here. Everyone knee-jerk criticizes telemetry without thinking through the effectiveness of alternative means of discovering and prioritizing bugs.

Re:Bet you anything

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm quite serious here. Everyone knee-jerk criticizes telemetry without thinking through the effectiveness of alternative means of discovering and prioritizing bugs.

You are such a complete and utter fucking moron it defies belief, did you know that?

What you are saying is pretty much the same bullshit argument the fascists and other assholes who want constant surveillance ... think of the children, it's for your own good, we need to catch criminals.

Fuck you.

Microsoft decreed that the details of everyone's personal computer was theirs, that your usage history is for them to have, and that they can do any and all things to your computer as they see fit.

Microsoft put telemetry into the OS to measure how effective their forced upgrade to Windows 10 was.

If Microsoft wants to measure the magnitude of their suck, go back to having a goddamned fucking QA department instead of making us the fucking beta testers. Instead they've basically been playing fast and loose, putting out shit quality software, and then when it breaks relying on telemetry after-the-fact to see what they did wrong.

You are saying the moral equivalent of "hey, it's OK for Microsoft to spy on you, it's for your own good" ... or "you have nothing to hide if you have nothing to fear".

Sorry, in my book, uttering that shit gets you a sound beating with a sock full of nickles.

Go ahead, hand your privacy over to Microsoft, but don't expect anything but a punch in the head if you suggest I should be required to do the same.

Asshole.

Re:Bet you anything

[Knightman]

Instead of treating their customers as beta-testers in some regards while siphoning up telemetry data they could put some effort into making their products a bit more robust while at the same produce sane error messages and stop putting out useless updates that for example upgrades Notepad to "The 3D Extravaganza VR Experience DELUXE Version (now with multi-strawberry pixel-sounds!)".

Imagine you buy a new car, after a month it wont start with a message on the dash saying "Ops! Something went wrong!" and nothing else. You get it towed to a Certified Mechanicâ that diagnoses the fault while charging you a bunch of money. He informs you that the car wont start because one of your tires has a too low pressure and wonder if you want to swap it out whereupon you go WTF? while wondering why the heck the original message on the dash couldn't have told you about the low pressure so you could have adjusted it.

That's the experience many MS products leaves us right now.

Anyway, rant over...

Re:Bet you anything

[Knightman]

You mean like a "check engine" light?

If you car shows a "check engine" light when your tire pressure is low it may have been built by Microsoft.

Re:Bet you anything

[Obfuscant]

If you car shows a "check engine" light when your tire pressure is low it may have been built by Microsoft.

Your car shows "check engine" for all kinds of stupid problems, including a "loose gas cap". Replace "low tire pressure" with that and you've got exactly the problem you are ranting about.

In other words, Microsoft is not unique in this kind of useless warning.

Lucky bastards

[jfdavis668]

Unfortunately, mine is still receiving updates.

Not a bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a bug. This is a feature.

How far along into death by 1000 cuts is Win10?

[ITRambo]

Windows 10 must be more than halfway through driving consumers onto a much faster student-oriented platform (ChromeOS), a superior OS (Linux Mint, etc), or a competitor (Mac)S). I can't believe how shitty the OS service has been, and how often the cloud "breaks", under Satya's "leadership".

Re:How far along into death by 1000 cuts is Win10?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe how shitty the OS service has been, and how often the cloud "breaks", under Satya's "leadership".

Agreed. I did not think that anyone could top the incompetence that had lead to the release of Windows Vista, but here we are.

Despite all of his shenanigans, Ballmer was never as bad as Nadella.

Re:How far along into death by 1000 cuts is Win10?

[SurenEnfiajyan]

Yeah, the only bad side of Windows 8/8.1 is the UI, which can be fixed by classic shell, but otherwise it's very solid underneath and faster.

Microsoft has had DNS troubles for 3 days now

[Anonymous Coward]

This morning it was xboxlive, skype and skype for business impacted, with scatterings of Office 365 issues throughout the day.

Yesterday they were so fuxxored they could not update the Azure status page because even internal MS authentication didn't work, so they couldn't mark the services down. But Kronos SSO and Office 360 were hammered, at one point they were getting thousands of signon failures all over the country. Their customers, including us, were screaming bloody murder, and ADP was looking pretty stupid for directing customers to authenticate Kronos against Azure instead of local DCs (actually that still looks pretty stupid.)

I don't know why they aren't talking to non-customers yet... at first Microsoft was trying to blame everything on Level 3, but then they said they'd fixed that, and yet we have seen it multiple times today.

Re:Easy explaniation

[arglebargle_xiv]

"We couldn't connect to the update service. We'll try again later, or you can check now. If it still doesn't work, make sure you're connected to the Internet"

"Hi. This is a message from Microsoft. I'm sure at this point you're expecting something that will allow you to diagnose the problem, but we've dumbed it down to the point where it's beyond useless and has gone to insulting. But then, you're a Windows 10 user so you're probably used to being insulted by us anyway. Love, Satya."

Re:Easy explaniation

[drinkypoo]

See.. "Rest of the world warmer than normal" Proof of global warming.
Record cold in US, its weather not climate.

Tovarisch, these things are happening at the same time. The globe is overall warmer right now even though it's cold in the USA, and the fact that the cold is in the USA right now is weather caused by the current condition of the climate. You don't even understand the argument well enough to troll convincingly.