Windows 11’s Media Creation Tool is busted at the worst possible time

There are a lot of people looking to upgrade to Windows 11 right now… and apparently a lot of them are having trouble doing so. Because one of the most popular methods for moving from Windows 10 to the new operating system—Microsoft’s official Media Creation Tool—has a debilitating bug in its latest release. Whoops!

If you’re unaware, the Media Creation Tool is a super-simple way to download a small program from Microsoft and bake it onto a USB drive that can then be used to install a copy of Windows on a PC. It’s an excellent method for installing fresh and starting from scratch, especially if you need to do so for another computer, say, in aid of family tech support. The Media Creation Tool has been around in various flavors for years, and it’s periodically updated as a separate piece of software… and the latest update has broken it for some users on Windows 10.

That’s according to Microsoft itself, who filed it as a bug on October 10th (that’s 11 days after the tool was updated). According to the official “Known Issues” page for Windows (spotted by Windows Latest), Windows 10 machines on the 22H2 release are seeing the tool “close unexpectedly, displaying no error message.”

The fact that this was an update to the tool that immediately preceded the self-imposed deadline that Microsoft set for a Windows 11 upgrade is unfortunate (or hilarious, depending on your point of view). Oh, and despite being nominally the “second half of 2022” release according to the name, 22H2 is, in fact, the latest full version of Windows 10. It’s the one that you need to be on if you want to be eligible for that extra year of security updates from Microsoft.

It seems unlikely that this issue is affecting the majority of Windows 10 users who are downloading the Media Creation Tool, if only because it took more than a week for Microsoft to officially comment on the situation. And there are plenty of other ways to upgrade if that’s what you want to do, not least of which is to just borrow a Windows 11 machine, where the tool seems to be working fine. You could also just download the ISO and create a bootable flash drive the old-fashioned way.

But yeah, it’s not a great look in a situation that was already looking pretty not-great. Since the problem has been documented on the Known Issues page, I imagine someone at Microsoft is scrambling to resolve it as you read these words.