Event details
Is there any officially supported way for our IT team to force Windows 11 to retry a failed Windows update immediately on a remote workstation? We had a registry issue on 100+ workstations that caused the July CU to fail, and after each machine had failed the update several times WU was waiting 7+ days before automatically retrying the update. So after fixing the registry issue on each workstation, we ended up needing to connect to each one to manually click the “retry/download all/etc” button.
I’ve seen some discussion online about “usoclient”, but in my testing I couldn’t get that command to retry a failed update. I also couldn’t find official documentation so I assume it’s not officially supported. I know we could also use an Intune WU policy to set a specific time for a machine to update, but this was not feasible in this instance since each machine was manually fixed at different times.
You can control this part of the update experience via Update Deadlines - once the deadline is reached, Windows continues pursuing installation/restart until compliance is achieved. From 22H2, you can configure a deadline for Quality or Feature updates.
Windows automatically retries failed downloads or installations during subsequent scan cycles.
- pc-88Aug 20, 2026Brass Contributor
Yes, these machines already had deadlines set but as the updates continued to fail for a few weeks, they were waiting longer and longer in between retries. I will assume this means there is no other officially supported method.
- BillBieber57Aug 20, 2026Brass Contributor
I have been using PSWindowsUpdate module but it's not perfect but sometimes can work