Windows 10 October 2018 Update Pulled - Here's What You Should Do

Some Windows 10 users might be finding themselves in a troubled state this week after the new October 2018 Update has been discovered to be deleting personal files after installation. The problem was noticed almost immediately after Microsoft began rolling out the new Windows 10 version during this week's Surface press event. It's not yet clear how widespread the issue is, but it's significant enough that Microsoft has halted the rollout of the October 2018 Update.

The company has updated its Windows Update support site with the message that it "paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating." Affected users have found files in the Documents and Pictures folders gone after installing the update, with no way of restoring them without manual backups.

Those who hadn't gotten around to the automated update rollout should consider themselves lucky, as Microsoft's only guidance at this point is that users who experienced missing files should contact the company directly. For those users who manually downloaded the October 2018 Update file, it should absolutely not be installed and they should wait for a future version to be released.

What's most surprising — and disappointing — about this problem is that the October 2018 Update went through a widespread, lengthy testing process, and it still managed to slip through to the public release. Even worse is that some users in the Windows Insider program even experienced the file deletion issue during the testing stage, suggesting that Microsoft either rushed things for this week's press event, or failed to correctly implement a fix before release.

SOURCE Microsoft Support