The August update is crashing games, and Microsoft is now on the record

On Monday, Microsoft's release notes for KB5121003 still said the company "is not currently aware of any issues with this update." At 17:50 Pacific on Wednesday, that stopped being true. The August update now has its own entry on Microsoft's release health dashboard, marked Investigating, under the heading "Microsoft has received reports of certain games becoming unresponsive."

The named titles are ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls and The Finals, on Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2. Microsoft lists four symptoms: the game stops responding, it closes without notice, an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION error appears, and - the one that reaches beyond gaming - "the device restarting without warning." A game that crashes is a nuisance. A PC that reboots on its own while you have unsaved work open is something else.

The cause looks settled even if Microsoft's wording isn't. Embark Studios, which makes The Finals and ARC Raiders, pointed at inpoutx64.sys, a low-level driver that changed with the update. Almost nobody installs that file deliberately - it arrives bundled with third-party utilities, Razer's keyboard software among them - and Embark's temporary fix is to remove it. Microsoft is more careful, saying only that it is "presently investigating to determine if this is an issue caused by Microsoft," which is the phrasing used while blame is still open.

If the PC is mainly for games and everything ran fine a fortnight ago, pulling one stray driver is a smaller step than uninstalling a security update that closed more than 400 holes. Save a copy of your drivers first, though. Tendvane can back up the drivers currently on the machine and put them back if a removal turns out to be the wrong call.