An update issue with Windows 10 on January 29th was caused by the outage of an unknown external DNS service provider from Microsoft, according to the company. The issue prevented some users in the United States and United Kingdom from receiving security, software, and operating system updates from the Microsoft Store and Windows Update. Also the SmartScreen filter, didn't properly work for some users.
It was initially thought that the culprit was a malfunctioning DNS server from American internet provider Comcast. Later it was determined that also users in the United Kingdom could no longer update their software and operating system. Most of those users were on BT Broadband. Some affected users switched their own DNS to Google's public DNS and found they could update their systems again.
Meanwhile, Microsoft was silent on what happened. However, yesterday the company explained what went wrong.
“The Windows Update service was impacted by a data corruption issue in an external DNS service provider global outage on January 29, 2019,” according to Microsoft against ZDNet. According to the software giant, the issue was fixed the same day. Nevertheless, a limited number of customers continued to experience issues. According to Microsoft this was because so-called downstream DNS servers still had to be updated to the correct Windows Update entries.
Users who still can't update will have to wait, or switch their DNS server (temporarily) to a public DNS service such as 8.8.8.8 from Google, or 1.1.1.1 from Cloudflare.
