Microsoft Confirms Windows Update Problems Were Caused by DNS Issues
Since January 29th, Windows 10 users have been reporting problems connecting to Windows Update. Microsoft has confirmed that this was caused by DNS corruption at an external DNS provider that was causing bad records to be pushed to ISP's DNS servers.
Just yesterday we reported that even though Microsoft had reportedly fixed the issue, users were still complaining that they were unable to connect to Windows Update. At the time of that article's writing, Microsoft had still not disclosed any information regarding the cause of the problems.
As users were able to resolve the Windows Update problem by switching their DNS servers to Google's 8.8.8.8 service of Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 service, we suspected that this was a DNS issue. In a new update last night to the Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 update history support article, Microsoft has confirmed that this problem was caused by data corruption at an external DNS service provider. This caused incorrect records to be pushed to downstream DNS servers at other ISPs.