The update that killed SSDs, and Microsoft's fix was to ask around
July 2025 update linked to SSD and HDD failures and data corruption
The market's verdict: +0.2% on MSFT in the week after.
What actually happened
Through August 2025, users reported the July security update causing solid state drives to fail, vanish from the system, or corrupt data during large transfers, in the worst cases bricking the drive entirely. Microsoft confirmed it was aware and, as its first move, asked affected customers to send feedback, which for people whose disk had just died was a bold suggestion about where to type. Mitigations arrived with the August 28 update while reports kept trickling in. An update that eats the storage it is stored on is a special kind of recursion.
This one is officially acknowledged.
Were you affected? Unbreak it
Uninstall the July update ↗
wusa /uninstall /kb:5063878 /quiet /norestart
Mitigated in the August 28, 2025 update
Microsoft has acknowledged this issue; a fix ships in an out-of-band or next cumulative update. Check Windows Release Health before manual workarounds.
Drive still detected? Back it up before touching anything
If the disk still shows up, copy off everything you care about first. Multiple affected users watched the failures progress to full drive loss; a backup beats uninstall math.
Links
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Impact
- BleepingComputer (publication)
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Context
- BleepingComputer (publication)
↳ caused by KB5063878 (July 2025 update)
Timeline
- Aug 21, 2025 Confirmed First reports came in.
- Aug 28, 2025 Mitigated Mitigations shipped with the August 28 update.