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System administrators have taken to Reddit to report a bizarre situation where Windows Server 2022 systems are unexpectedly upgraded to Windows Server 2025. Fatboy40 reports on Reddit that this issue occurred on a customer’s servers and there was no way to roll back to Windows Server 2022.
From a typical Windows user’s point of view, an upgrade from 2022 to 2025 may sound like a great idea, but this type of behavior can turn into an administrator/IT nightmare. Operating system upgrades for server-level applications should be reviewed and tested by the IT department to ensure that the software and associated business/enterprise software running on the new version of Windows do not break compatibility.
Fatboy40 says that three days ago, all of its customers’ Windows 2022 servers had upgraded to Windows Server 2025 or were “on the verge of doing so.” The icing on the cake is that this update was pushed despite the fact that Windows Server 2025 technically requires new licenses – as Windows Server 2025 is classified as a brand new version of Windows Server and not an update like Windows 11 24H2.
But it appears the update was mistakenly classified by Microsoft as both an optional update and a security update for Windows Server 2022 machines, according to an employee of third-party update service Heimdal.
“Our team discovered this discrepancy in our patch repository,” Andrei van Heimdal wrote via Reddit “because the GUID for the Windows Server 2025 upgrade does not match the usual entries for KB5044284 associated with Windows 11. This appears to be a bug on Microsoft’s part. , which affects both the release speed and the classification of the update. After checking with Microsoft’s KB repository, we confirmed that the KB number indeed refers to Windows 11, not Windows Server 2025.”
The worst? This type of upgrade on Windows Server is technically not officially supported, unlike upgrades from Windows 10 to Windows 11. As a result, system administrators are stuck in the mud without any official method to downgrade their operating systems back to Windows Server 2022 if they don’t have third-party solutions that provide system restore functionality from previously created backups.