Schedulled Tasks not running on Server 2016 or 2019!

Question

Schedulled Tasks not running on Server 2016 or 2019!

James Hayman 6

Hello,

While running my weekly checks this morning I have noticed that a bunch of servers that should have automatically rebooted last night, but they have failed to do so. As I started to dig a bit deeper I have discovered that every Server 2019/2016 machine we have failed to run it scheduled tasks last night. While our existing Server 2012 machines rebooted without issue.

So these scheduled task run a WSUS update check, install the updates then 90 mins later reboot the machine. They run on every server, every week, and then depending which AD group the server is in it will reboot on it's given week, be that Dev, Test, UAT, or Production. Last night UAT failed to reboot all of our 2019 and 2016 servers. I have had no issues with Dev or Test in this cycle over the past 3 weeks. I am now concerned that Production will not reboot correctly this coming weekend.

As a side note it is not just this group of tasks that failed to run, we have hundreds of tasks that run, such as auto generated reports that are emailed to people, they also seem to have failed to start.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the scripts run weekly, but the last run time is the 24th Oct, it should be the 31st Oct.

Has anyone come across this? Could this be a result of the UK's clock moving back an hour on Saturday (Not that this has ever been an issue before)

Thank you in advance,

James

clarkey 1 Reputation point

2021-11-02T11:10:32.367+00:00

Have also noticed the exact same problem, we have tasks which are progressing in their next run time but not actually running. This is on Server 2019 (Version 1809 - Build: 17763.2237)

Problems only started with the UK DST changes, in an attempt to get the tasks to work we've switched them all to UTC and have had no luck.

This is affecting hundreds of tasks.
Ben Weston 1 Reputation point

2021-11-03T14:04:53.89+00:00

Also seeing the issue here (also UK).

We haven't yet been able to test whether this will be resolved by a Server reboot, has anyone any feedback as to that?
RobertTaylor-5819 1 Reputation point

2021-11-03T14:54:08.197+00:00

We are seeing this issue on both user created tasks and also system created ones (e.g. Volume shadow copy).

Limited testing seems to suggest that any new tasks or new schedules for VSC seem to work ok but any existing tasks are failing as above.

Again as above we've only seen this issue from the weekend that the clock changed.
Mark C 1 Reputation point

2021-11-04T13:56:27.76+00:00

We've seen the same issue with tasks that run only on certain days of the week e.g. Mon to Fri, while daily tasks are unaffected. Nothing in the history or event log indicates what the issue is with the affected tasks,

It was only noticed this morning (Thursday 4th) when one of the tasks started up again at around 8am - the server hadn't been rebooted or anything done to restart the tasks as far as we can tell.

4 answers

Your answer

clarkey 1 Reputation point

2021-11-02T11:10:32.367+00:00

Have also noticed the exact same problem, we have tasks which are progressing in their next run time but not actually running. This is on Server 2019 (Version 1809 - Build: 17763.2237)

Problems only started with the UK DST changes, in an attempt to get the tasks to work we've switched them all to UTC and have had no luck.

This is affecting hundreds of tasks.
Ben Weston 1 Reputation point

2021-11-03T14:04:53.89+00:00

Also seeing the issue here (also UK).

We haven't yet been able to test whether this will be resolved by a Server reboot, has anyone any feedback as to that?
RobertTaylor-5819 1 Reputation point

2021-11-03T14:54:08.197+00:00

We are seeing this issue on both user created tasks and also system created ones (e.g. Volume shadow copy).

Limited testing seems to suggest that any new tasks or new schedules for VSC seem to work ok but any existing tasks are failing as above.

Again as above we've only seen this issue from the weekend that the clock changed.
Mark C 1 Reputation point

2021-11-04T13:56:27.76+00:00

We've seen the same issue with tasks that run only on certain days of the week e.g. Mon to Fri, while daily tasks are unaffected. Nothing in the history or event log indicates what the issue is with the affected tasks,

It was only noticed this morning (Thursday 4th) when one of the tasks started up again at around 8am - the server hadn't been rebooted or anything done to restart the tasks as far as we can tell.

Answer 1

Daniel Rowland 1

We are also seeing the described symptoms on Server 2016, we are also in the UK and have only noticed this since DST time change over the weekend.

Answer 2

Paul Staniforth 76

Hi All,

I can confirm that I have seen this a lot on Windows 2016 Servers in the UK with many of our clients. A re-boot of the server resolved the issue of the tasks on being triggered, but introduced a new problem of the tasks running 1 hour earlier than scheduled.

This might be something to do with the fact that the clocks haven't changed in the US yet as their clocks go back on the first Sunday in November , e.g a week after the UK

Answer 3

It appears this was asked and answered in Spring 2021.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/340419/task-scheduler-did-not-start-monthly-task-after-da.html

We are seeing the same behavior. From our research, It appears a UTC component in the Windows task scheduler is not getting changed with the system time. We resolve this by dropping, then redefining the job from scratch.

Before:
<StartBoundary>2021-11-12T01:15:00-05:00</StartBoundary>

After:
<StartBoundary>2021-11-12T02:15:00-05:00</StartBoundary>

Answer 4

RKennedy-9588 1

KarlieWeng-MSFT answered • Apr 02 2021 at 2:40 AM EXPERT ANSWERCOMMUNITY EXPERT
HI @Robert

This seems a bug that has been know and confirmed by Microsoft for over a year, One way would be delete the job and recreate it.

Share via

Schedulled Tasks not running on Server 2016 or 2019!

4 answers

Your answer