All USB devices Disconnect randomly on Windows 11.

Anonymous
2023-10-09T03:59:17+00:00

All of my USB devices randomly disconnect and will sometimes reconnect on their own in 10-20 seconds. Other times when they do not reconnect I have to completely restart the PC to get devices back working. I have tried uninstalling drivers for the USB roothubs and devices with no luck of a fix. I have not seen this issue addressed elsewhere or corrected. Other instances have not been similar to mine and this issue was non existent before upgrading to Win11. I even did a repair install of Win11 with no luck either. Any help or fixes would be greatly appreciated.

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Devices and drivers

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments No comments

134 answers

Sort by: Newest
  1. Anonymous
    2025-02-17T16:24:02+00:00

    So I am back yet again with some updates and answers.

    Yes, I am running Windows 11 on both machines.

    Sadly though I didn't check the forums before going back to the other PC so I didn't do the test, but both machines seem to run well yet again.

    Main PC:

    • I haven't had any disconnects since last I left an update, I updated to 24h2 today, so right now I have all the windows updates installed.
    • I've changed my hub recently because of connection issues but that wasn't the reason the USB's would disconnect. [It happened even when the hub was disconnected from the front port]
    • I'm using the PC without issues, I connect and disconnect external drives and the issue doesn't seem to reappear.

    Alt PC:

    • I've used it from December to mid-January.
    • I've changed to different mouses, I haven't had a disconnection issue.
    • I've had a lot of peripherals connected to that too and still no more USB issues.

    At this moment, I at least, am back to square 1.

    • I've checked voltages to make sure it's not a surcharge on the USB port(s) [fail-safe disconnections].
    • I've checked USB event history and nothing seemed off before the disconnections happened.
    • There are no same PC parts that we all use.
    • There are no same third-party apps that we all use.
    • There are no same external USB devices that we all use.

    It's weird that for me at least, out of a sudden, everything is alright now for the last 4 months - 0 disconnects.

    I think that the origin of this issue would be found in a closed environment with multiple PC's that have the same issue, cause right now the number of variables are a lot.

    Sadly I don't think I'll be of any help since I've got nothing to diagnose anymore, but I'll keep an eye on the forum and if I can answer to any of your question or just in case I'll have any leads, information, etc., I'll write.

    Good luck everyone!

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments
  2. Anonymous
    2025-01-29T10:10:42+00:00

    at this point. those who are facing this issue shouldnt start changing things
    its not anything we've changed', unless you changed something to make this happen.
    in my case no..
    so why should i change anything trying to chase a bug that i didnt cause.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments No comments
  3. Anonymous
    2025-01-29T02:11:10+00:00

    I'm getting this issue on a brand-new PC build and it's frustrating.

    I thought it might be a lemon PSU, so I replaced it with a better one. It seems like it kind of helped, not getting daily crashes, but still getting the USB disconnects. I tried disabling the "allow device to be powered down" option on all USB devices and it did not help. System still did a full sweep disconnect of all USB devices with no option but to restart the PC. Also on 24H2.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments
  4. Anonymous
    2025-01-25T01:17:23+00:00

    Update, I went into device manager and selected every USB controller and device and went into settings and disable the “allow device to be powered down” option under the last power options tab and rebooted and I haven’t hit the disconnect or reconnect issue again after hours of use. I’m still not 100% sure if this solved the issue but it greatly improved things.

    I also went into the BIOS and set all the USB stuff back to default. The network card also seems to be showing to reliably again too. I’ll update if I hit the issues again but this needs to be solved with a real fix so it doesn’t power down entire USB controllers and hubs to save power just bedause they haven’t done something for a little bit. Because the devices attached to them are still active like my keyboard and mouse for instance.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments
  5. Anonymous
    2025-01-23T08:17:29+00:00

    Hello,

    I'm so glad to see that I'm not going crazy! I recently upgraded from 23H2 to 24H2 on my 13900k PC with RTX 4090 graphics card and this problem started happening to me also. I searched the web far and wide and finally came across this post which describes the exact same problem I'm having. I have my keyboard connected directly to the PC via the top USB port on the back of the PC which is USB 3.0 and I have a 16 port Anker USB 3.0 powered hub directly connected to the USB 3.2 port on the motherboard with all my other peripherals connected to it including my Logitech G602 wireless mouse.

    The computer will just randomly make the USB disconnect noise and everything will shut down including my Stream Deck's, Mixer Board, Keyboard, Mouse, etc as if I unplugged them all from the system simultaneously and they even disappear in device manager when this happens for 5-10 seconds and then they all start popping back online making the connected noises. This never happened on 23H2 but now happens a few times an hour on 24H2 almost making the computer unusable. I've also noticed that if I'm in the middle of typing when it happens the last keystroke I made just repeats over and over again until the keyboard comes back online along with everything else. It's a very bizarre problem and I've tried so many things to try and solve it like disabling the sleep for USB hubs and devices under device manager and it does nothing.

    I will add that I've had a few times where everything disconnects and just never comes back, and I have to physically shut down the computer with the power button and turn it back on for it to boot up and for me to have any USB devices working again. This only happens once or twice a day though whereas the disconnect and reconnect in 5-10 seconds happens multiple times at random every day. I've also had it happen both while using edge and while not suing edge, but edge may have been open since I don't have it disabled on boot and it's always in the background. I noticed some people saying that edge might be the problem so I figured I would volunteer that information.

    This problem is 100% localized to 24H2 over 23H2 since it didn't occur on 23H2 after 6+ months of running it on this PC, not even once. But it happens at least once an hour with 24H2 and sometimes as frequently as 2-3 times in 10 minutes, so I have no idea what is causing it to happen. One other major symptom that I noticed that nobody else seems to be mentioning the thread from what I read is that sometimes when I boot up my PC my PCIe 10GB nic driver doesn't load. I'll open device manager and it's nowhere to be found and I have no internet connection. I have to physically restart the PC for it to come back online. This never happened in 23H2 also. So, I suspect the problem that is causing the USB devices to disconnect and reconnect is also causing other PCIe devices to disconnect and reconnect that I just didn't notice before since I couldn't use the PC while all my HID devices were offline for 5-10 seconds.

    I also noticed while live streaming this last Saturday on YouTube for a few hours that the network would also disconnect and reconnect on occasion and I'm wondering if the nic is disappearing and reappearing during these instances also but I didn't have device manager open so I can't be certain. All I know is that i just randomly started dropping packets from my ping test I run to test internet during my live streams, and it would just lose a few frames before getting responses again and I verified from my Unifi switch that internet never went down during that time so it must have been related to something on my PC causing the internet to disconnect. Perhaps next stream I will also ping a local source like my gateway and see if those packets get dropped during the outage also which would confirm this is possibly related.

    I tried playing with some BIOS settings to ensure that USB devices are never powered down and I also changed the power profile plan and device manager power settings for everything to make sure it never goes to sleep but it has no impact the problem still occurs completely at random. The programs loaded at the time this happens most commonly would be MSI Afterburner, Discord, iCloud, Elgato Control Center, PowerToys, Steam, TailScale, 3D Connexxion space navigator, signal, NordVPN and UniGetUI. These are the default programs loaded when the PC is running. However, I've closed a bunch of them and the problem will still happen, so I don't think any of them are contributing to it's frequency but I wanted to make it clear what was running in case anyone else saw some correlation.

    It's been a nightmare trying to work on this PC with this issue persisting and I've also asked my audience about it on social media and several other people have reported similar problems with USB devices disconnecting and reconnection all at once in 24H2 that isn't happening on 23H2. This doesn't impact every PC obviously because I have a PC in my bedroom that is a 7700k with RTX 3080 that works just fine and an AMD Laptop that also works perfectly with 24H2 without any problems with USB disconnect/reconnect or NIC for that matter. This seems to only impact my main machine that I upgraded from 23H2.

    All my system information is below along with screen shots from all my USB controllers, hubs and composite devices. I did notice that one of them has a driver from 2006 which I thought was a bit on the old side, but I never confirmed the driver version or date under 23H2 so I'm not sure if it's different or not. But, I told it to check for driver updates and it didn't find any so it wouldn't have installed a driver this old during the upgrade process if it didn't get it online somewhere and it was newer than the previous version, right?

    I worked at Microsoft for 15 years on the Windows ESC team running quality gates for WINMAIN so if anyone wants to work with me directly to triage this further and try to get to the bottom of it I'm game since I would like to have my PC stable again! Also, I hope this leads to a solution since a lot of people seem to be impacted by this and nobody seems to be any closer to an actual solution. All we know for sure is this is 100% related to 24H2 since 23H2 didn't have any of these problems at all. And whatever is causing the problems seems to be related to PCIe devices unloading and loading and not necessarily just USB devices since it also seems to impact my 10GB NIC and sometimes like I said it won't even show up at all after booting and I have to physically reboot the machine for it to show up under device manager even if I tell it to scan for new hardware it won't load it. So, it's almost like the BIOS or UEFI isn't presenting the devices to the operating system or breaking the link between the OS and the hardware. Did anything change related to the hardware abstraction layer for 24H2 or UEFI handoff? Because my guess is that it's somewhere in there and there is some common thread, we haven't discovered yet between all of us that is causing this bug to be triggered, and it could be something related to BIOS settings or hardware timings or even IRQ/DMA ****.

    Let me know if you guys want any more information to try and figure this out? In the meantime everyone else should post their machine information and USB driver information under device manager and also let us know if you're seeing other PCIe devices like NIC and GPU connect and disconnect. Actually, now that I think about it, I also had a problem where one of my displays would also disappear from device manager entirely and say it doesn't get a signal when I switch between HDR and non-HDR with CTRL+WIN+B and I would have to reboot for the display to come back. So, that's yet another driver that unloads and doesn't come back. But, the GPU hasn't done it to my knowledge yet and the other 2 screens still continued working so it was specific to the display driver for the individual monitor and not the GPU itself. Perhaps because the GPU is more low level of a driver with different rules because of the WDDM driver model stuff so the PC doesn't blue screen on driver failure is protecting it from hitting the same PCIe unload/reload problem but it's not protecting the actual driver for the display itself that gets the EID data and sets the resolution, refresh rate, etc. I'm just thinking out loud.

    System Information
    OS Name Microsoft Windows 11 Pro

    Version 10.0.26100 Build 26100

    Other OS Description Not Available

    OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation

    System Name BARNACULESPC

    System Manufacturer ASRock

    System Model Z790 Pro RS

    System Type x64-based PC

    System SKU To Be Filled By O.E.M.

    Processor 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900K, 3000 Mhz, 24 Core(s), 32 Logical Processor(s)

    BIOS Version/Date American Megatrends International, LLC. 16.02, 1/13/2025

    SMBIOS Version 3.5

    Embedded Controller Version 255.255

    BIOS Mode UEFI

    BaseBoard Manufacturer ASRock

    BaseBoard Product Z790 Pro RS

    BaseBoard Version

    Platform Role Desktop

    Secure Boot State Off

    PCR7 Configuration Elevation Required to View

    Windows Directory C:\WINDOWS

    System Directory C:\WINDOWS\system32

    Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume3

    Locale United States

    Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "10.0.26100.1"

    User Name BARNACULESPC\Jerry

    Time Zone Pacific Standard Time

    Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 96.0 GB

    Total Physical Memory 95.8 GB

    Available Physical Memory 77.9 GB

    Total Virtual Memory 102 GB

    Available Virtual Memory 78.4 GB

    Page File Space 6.00 GB

    Page File C:\pagefile.sys

    Kernel DMA Protection On

    Universal Serial Bus Controllers

    Thank you,

    Jerry (aka. Barnacules)

    https://linktr.ee/barnacules

    Was this answer helpful?

    4 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments No comments