Microsoft's Windows 10 Patch Tuesday Update Crashes OneDrive

An October Patch Tuesday update for Windows 10 is causing OneDrive and OneDrive for Business cloud storage services to crash, Microsoft has confirmed.

The problem, which can come after installing the October 11 KB5018410 update or later, affects systems running Windows 10 versions 22H2, 21H2, 21H1, and 20H2.

Microsoft said in an update to the Windows health dashboard that the company is working to resolve the issue and said a solution may be available in the coming week.

For users who have installed the Windows 10 versions 21H1 and 21H2 updates, "OneDrive might unexpectedly close, and you might receive an error" when attempting to run a number of tasks, including signing out or unlinking their account in the Microsoft OneDrive sync app, Microsoft said.

In addition, the problem may also arise if users try to unlink sites or folders from syncing to their device from Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Teams sites. Attempts to uninstall the OneDrive sync app also might fail, the vendor added.

This can be a significant problem for enterprises, which increasingly are storing data in the cloud rather than on-premises. According to market research firm Statista, as of this year, more than 60 percent of all corporate data is stored in the cloud – twice as much as in 2015 – with security, reliability, and agility being key drivers.

The KB5018410 update made improvements to the servicing stack for Windows 10. The servicing stack "is the component that installs Windows updates," Microsoft wrote at the time. "Servicing stack updates (SSU) ensure that you have a robust and reliable servicing stack so that your devices can receive and install Microsoft updates."

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Microsoft has had its challenges with OneDrive over the past year. In February, the company released an update for both Windows 10 and Windows 11 that fixed an issue in which OneDrive data that was locally synced would remain even if the user opted for all of it to be removed during a reset.

It was also a problem for enterprise IT administrators who would see OneDrive data stay intact after a remote reset by a mobile device management (MDM) application, such as the Intune cloud-based endpoint management tool.

Microsoft at the end of last year ended support for OneDrive in Windows 7, 8, and 8.1. In November 2021, cloud collaboration vendor Nextcloud and a number of EU software makers and cloud businesses filed a complaint with the European Commission accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior by bundling OneDrive into Windows.

The complaint was similar to other criticisms that have echoed through the years about the company's packaging of its applications with the near-ubiquitous operating system.

In April, there were reports from users of OneDrive for Business desktop clients crashing for users running Windows 7 on their systems. ®