Microsoft’s built-in antivirus in Windows 10 creates “thousands” of unnecessary files, filling the disk

Microsoft has released a problematic update for Windows 10’s built-in antivirus – Microsoft Defender or Windows Defender.

Microsoft's built-in antivirus in Windows 10 creates

On the forums and social news resource Reddit, there have been numerous complaints from users that Windows Defender is creating “thousands” of extra files in the system partition of the drive.

Defender comes preinstalled on all versions of Windows 10 and is regularly updated via Windows Update. After a recent update, in the last week of April, users noticed that the OS started creating thousands of files on the system drive – the Store folder in the Windows Defender partition was filling up. The files themselves are very small and harmless, but in some cases they can take up a huge amount of disk space.

Microsoft's built-in antivirus in Windows 10 creates

The crash even affects Windows Server versions. However, some users report that tens of millions of files have been created in their organization due to a failure:

We have three 2016 servers affected by the issue. Last night warnings about lack of free hard disk space started to appear. One server has 18 MILLION FILES in the Store folder. On the other – 13 MILLION. It takes hours to find and delete all such files. In total, these files occupy 50-60 GB of disk space. This is a serious blunder on the part of Microsoft. ”

However, there is good news – apparently, Microsoft quickly released an update that fixes the problem. The patch must be in Windows Defender Update 1.1.18100.6. Just in case, it’s worth checking for an update in Windows Update.

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