We Couldn’t Connect To The Update Service – Windows Update Not Working

When trying to update Windows Server 2019, I was getting this error:

We couldn’t connect to the update service

I’ll give you the steps I did to fix it. First I tried running the usual fix for Windows Update that you find on the internet, with no luck, which was to rename the SoftwareDistribution folder, thusly with this elevated command prompt command:

net stop wuauserv
net stop cryptSvc
net stop bits
net stop msiserver
Ren C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution SoftwareDistribution.old
Ren C:\Windows\System32\catroot2 Catroot2.old
net start wuauserv
net start cryptSvc
net start bits
net start msiserver

That didn’t work. The next thing I tried was to download an install the latest Windows Update for Server 2019 from the Windows Catalog, in the hope that it would skip any erroneous update in the queue or fix the Windows Update bug.

Naturally, I should mention that the first thing I actually tried was to update Windows without WSUS. Sorry, I forgot that step. Of course it didn’t work.

Finally, what fixed it was the Windows Troubleshooter (though I don’t know if installing the update from the Windows Catalog was part of the solution or not)! You can find the Windows Troubleshooter from the list in the right hand side of the Settings page when trying to update Windows. On the Troubleshooting page, click Windows Update (Resolve problems that prevent you from updating Windows.) and away you go. It’ll do it’s thing, then you can try to update Windows again as you did before. The We couldn’t connect to the update service error should be gone, though it’s worth noting that there might not be any Windows Updates to do since you hopefully already installed the latest from the Windows Catalog in the earlier step.

If this helped you, please link to it from other forums so it helps others and I can get some traffic to my website for going to the effort of sharing my fix 🙂