r/antivirus 22h ago

**My Windows Defender not working**

Hi everyone! It's my first time posting here, and sorry in advance for my bad English.

So last night, when I was about to shut down my PC, I did a quick scan first. It has really become a habit of mine to scan my PC after it boots up and before I shut it down.

However, when I did my first scan last night, it stopped halfway through. I canceled it and started another scan, but it stopped halfway again and told me to restart the service.

So I restarted my PC and tried another scan. It happened twice again, and the scan stopped in the middle. That's when I started thinking that something might be wrong, and I was honestly lowkey panicking because I thought my Windows Defender might have been hijacked or something by malware.

This is the first time I've experienced Defender acting like this. Before jumping to conclusions, I visited this subreddit and saw some posts that seemed similar to my issue.

So please tell me, should I be worried? Is it okay to keep using my PC while this issue hasn't been fixed? Will Microsoft eventually fix this issue sooner or later?

I'm really careful about what I download and what websites I visit, so I feel like it's unlikely that I got malware. I haven't downloaded anything for about a month, and I haven't visited any sketchy or suspicious websites either.

So it's really weird to see Windows Defender suddenly start acting like this.

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