Microsoft is investigating a potential issue with the August 2026 updates that may prevent some games from launching or cause them to crash on affected Windows 11 systems.
The confirmation follows user reports that a limited number of games, including ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals, become unresponsive on devices running Windows 11, version 25H2, and Windows 11, version 24H2.
The complete list of symptoms users are experiencing on impacted systems includes:
- games freezing
- games closing without notice
- “EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION” errors
- and unexpected system restarts
“Following the release of Windows updates on August 11, 2026 (KB5121003) and later, Microsoft received reports of issues involving inability to run games as expected,” Microsoft said in a Windows release health dashboard update on Wednesday.
“We are presently investigating to determine if this is an issue caused by Microsoft. We will provide an update when more information is available.”
The KB5121003 update was released last week as part of the August 2026 Patch Tuesday with Secure Boot updates and File Explorer and Windows Search improvements.
Microsoft also asked gamers experiencing these issues to file a report via the Feedback Hub app.
In total, with the August 2026 Patch Tuesday security updates, Microsoft patched 400 vulnerabilities, including one actively exploited and two publicly disclosed zero-day flaws.
In October 2024, Microsoft also blocked Windows 24H2 upgrades on some systems because of known issues that caused Easy Anti-Cheat blue screens and Asphalt 8 game crashes.
Last year, it also lifted a compatibility hold added after confirming that the Auto HDR Windows feature was breaking some games on Windows 11 24H2 systems.
More recently, it removed several upgrade blocks that prevented players of Asphalt 8: Airborne, Assassin’s Creed, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora from upgrading their devices to the latest Windows version.
Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.
The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.
