Getting a red banner telling you your antivirus is disabled is exactly the kind of notification that ruins an evening, and right now a lot of people are getting one for no reason at all. Microsoft has confirmed two separate problems in recent Windows servicing, and the more alarming of the two is purely cosmetic.
The first issue produces a notification claiming that Microsoft Defender Antivirus is turned off even when real-time protection is running normally. Per Microsoft’s own Windows Release Health dashboard and an updated Defender support document, the problem affects supported client and server editions of both Windows 10 and Windows 11 running recent Defender definition packages. Users report it appearing on every restart and continuing even after they mute the related notifications. Microsoft says a fix will arrive in a future Defender update and has not committed to a date.
Here is the part the aggregators skip, and the reason a cosmetic bug still deserves your attention: you should verify rather than assume. Open PowerShell and run Get-MpComputerStatus. Check three values in the output: AntivirusEnabled, RealTimeProtectionEnabled, and AMServiceEnabled. If all three return True, Defender is running and the notification is wrong. If any of them return False, the warning is not a bug and you have an actual problem to fix. Ten seconds of typing beats guessing, particularly given how many people’s instinct on seeing that banner is to go install something third-party.
The second issue is unrelated and cosmetic. Microsoft has acknowledged on the same dashboard that mouse cursor personalization can be lost after installing KB5120998, the optional August preview update delivered via builds 26200.9278 and 26100.9278 for Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2. Custom cursor schemes and animations revert to defaults, and high-DPI cursors are being replaced with oversized white ones. Some users report that restoring their previous configuration does not stick. Microsoft says it is still investigating whether the update is the cause. Server editions appear unaffected. Uninstalling KB5120998 is viable here because it is an optional preview, not a security update.
None of this is catastrophic, and both bugs are the sort of thing that gets patched quietly in a fortnight. But look at the run: Microsoft blamed RGB lighting software for games crashing a week ago, and before that it spent most of August working out why an update kept killing games. On the brighter side, HotHardware notes Microsoft has now identified a fix for the inpoutx64 driver problem and Windows will automatically block the offending driver when Arc Raiders launches, with the block expanding to Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls.
The takeaway is the same one it has been all month: hold optional preview updates unless you specifically need something in them. Run the PowerShell check, ignore the banner if it comes back clean and declare victory.
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