Oracle has come under fire for failing to fix a known issue with Windows instances on its cloud infrastructure (OCI).

One user told The Register that despite the problem with boot failures on Windows hosts causing production outages, Oracle has only offered a workaround rather than a fix.

Oracle [1]published the workaround earlier this month. It said that after restarting a Windows compute instance, the system fails to boot and remains stuck on the loading screen. It said workaround options included performing a diagnostic reboot, rebuilding the instance, and restarting it.

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However, a disgruntled systems administrator speaking to The Reg said the workaround was still causing production outages in workloads supporting SaaS applications.

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"About six weeks ago, we had a bunch of servers just fail to boot. It was post-patching – Windows security – and we restarted automatically, and they just didn't boot. We tried everything to get them back, and ended up restoring them from backup and creating new instances," he said.

Oracle initially suggested the issue may have been caused by changes on the user's side, rather than investigate. However, Big Red later added the problem to its known issues.

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"If you host an enterprise application that happens to still use legacy VMs on Oracle Cloud, and those are running Windows... if you restart your server, you're in a bit of a lottery as to whether it's going to come back up or not," the sysadmin said.

The tech pro explained that out of 60 production Windows servers in OCI, four failed to boot. Two of those were a cluster, taking out one of the company's instances of the application.

"It requires manual interventions," he said. "The customer has to go diagnose and restart, but there's nothing that automatically does this. From our point of view, we don't have confidence whether a server is going to restart or not. We also have to apply security patches, because that's just good practice, and security patches need to restart, so it's causing production outages."

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The user, who asked not to be identified, said that the company mostly used Azure, but kept some workloads on OCI because they use Oracle databases. He said if the reboot problem persisted, the company would consider putting the OCI workloads in Azure, which might cost more in storag, but offers relatively greater assurance of reliability.

El Reg has contacted Oracle for comment.

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Oracle could decide to rectify the problem as a hot fix – or out-of-cycle fix – but might be delayed because of communication with Microsoft, said Iain Saunderson, CTO of Spinnaker Support, which provides support for Oracle and SAP.

"It's probably something unique in Oracle's environment that maybe Microsoft doesn't experience anywhere else. It does highlight the investment you've got to make and the trust you've got to give to your cloud provider to do their best rather than just doing what works for them.

"Oracle is probably trying to fix it, but they're like, 'lets have [a] work around and see if that buys us a pass on having to produce a hot fix or having to escalate this with Microsoft.' It speaks to the trust that you put in your cloud providers." ®

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[1] https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Compute/known-issues.htm#Windows-stuck-loading

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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/30/licensing_change_oracle_virtualbox/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/openai_oracle_gpus/

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