It has been a shaky couple of months for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, with several instances of flagging high profile legitimate services as malicious, including Chrome and Office. In the latest issue, the business security software is reportedly causing issues for users running Windows 10 version 20H2.
According to Borncity, the problems Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is causing have been ongoing for around a month. This issues include memory running extremely high when the program is running, black screen delays of 2 minutes or more when logging in, and issues with opening Word 2016 or newer.
The report also points to an issue where Windows Event View is taking longer than normal to show events. It seems all the issues stem from Defender for Endpoint causing memory overloads that impact wider performance on Windows 10 20H2.
It is also more certainly a memory leak bug causing the problem. In fact, Microsoft knew about the issue and said it had fixed it. According to the company, the problems began with signature build 1.363.177.0 (from Jay on Twitter).
Despite the fix, it seems the bug is persisting. It is unclear if the reports come from users who have not updated Defender for Endpoint or not.
False Positives
As mentioned, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been giving false positives on major software. For example, a recent situation with Chrome during April.
Just last month the program was flagging Microsoft’s own Office product as suspicious. At the time, Microsoft said it was working on solutions to make false positives less common. It seems those changes have not yet been implemented.
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