Windows 2012 R2 Installed Updates But Unexpectedly Restarted

Question

Yesterday (Friday the 13th), we encountered several servers that were unexpectedly restarted after Windows Update installation even the auto-restart has been disabled on GPO/Policy settings.

The common of these affected servers were in Windows Server 2012 R2 version. And as checked on the event viewer, we found an event ID 22 before the restart, where it indicates the KBs there & will be restarted in 15mins.

Upon research, event ID 22 is something to do w/ publishing settings using trace configuration utilities. Now, I'm not sure if the unexpected restart is due to Windows update or a 3rd party app that uses trace configuration settings (like remote tool app or something else) that was mentioned.

Would like to ask if someone here also encountered the same issue ?

And would like to ask Microsoft Team as well as we read about this kind of restart behavior of Windows 2012 R2 last 2019, that after 3days of updates installation, it will indicate that will be restarted in 15mins. Is this really the cause of the issue we faced & it will bypass the Policy settings w/c has been disabled for auto-restart ?

Your response & thoughts about this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

Hi there,

This is an bug that was reported in server 2012 and a hot fix was rolled for this issue.

An update is available that lets you control how the Automatic Updates client applies updates in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. After you install this update, the "Configure Automatic Updates" policy setting will work again as it used to in previous Windows operating systems.

Allow configuration of Automatic Updates in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/topic/allow-configuration-of-automatic-updates-in-windows-8-and-windows-server-2012-829e3562-567b-1151-aae7-32c5a8ea823a

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