It’s not for me to judge what you do with your new rig outside of gaming—I just hope you’re taking the necessary precautions, and set up your anti-virus of choice at the first opportunity. Microsoft Defender is better than nothing, except for when it says it’s been turned off when it actually hasn’t.
Apparently, this is a known issue in Windows 11 and Windows 10. Microsoft details the issue, writing, “Notifications might appear stating that ‘Microsoft Defender Antivirus is turned off,’ even though the antivirus is functioning correctly and all settings show it as active. These notifications can appear when Windows starts and intermittently afterward.”
Worse still, these fibbing notifs can “persist even if notification settings are turned off.” But worse than that, the issue can be observed in “any version of Windows or Windows Server with Microsoft Defender Antivirus running with the latest Defender updates.”
Before you ask, that is a lot of Windows 11 and Windows 10 users potentially affected. Potentially affected platforms include Windows 11, version 26H1, version 25H2, as well as version 24H2, and range all the way back to ye olde Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2016. Microsoft has a full list here of operating systems that can encounter the bug. The company is currently working on a fix, though there’s no word yet on when this will be available.
For now, it’s annoying at best and kind of anxiety-inducing at worst, though arguably not quite as bad as the Windows 11 update that borked a bunch of multiplayer games last month. That’s not a great look considering Microsoft said earlier this year it wanted to make Windows 11 “better.”
To be fair, the work hasn’t been all back steps; for instance, fresh features like the ‘low latency profile‘ speeding up the OS, and our Jacob reckons recent changes to the Windows 11 Start menu also look promising. Here’s hoping Microsoft fixes that Defender notification bug sooner rather than later too.