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System administrators have taken to Reddit to report a bizarre situation in which Windows Server 2022 systems are unexpectedly upgraded to Windows Server 2025. Fat boy40 reports on Reddit that this issue occurred on a customer’s servers with no way to revert to Windows Server 2022.

From a typical Windows user’s perspective, upgrading from 2022 to 2025 may seem like a great idea, but this type of behavior can turn into a nightmare for system/IT administrators. Operating system upgrades for server-level applications should be verified and tested by IT to ensure that associated enterprise software running on the new version of Windows does not break compatibility.

Fatboy40 claims that three days ago, all of their client’s Windows 2022 servers had been upgraded to Windows Server 2025 or “were about to do so.” The icing on the cake is that this update was pushed despite the fact that Windows Server 2025 technically requires a new license – since Windows Server 2025 is classified as a brand new version of Windows Server and not an update such as Windows 11 24H2.

But it appears the update was accidentally classified by Microsoft as both an optional update and a security update for Windows Server 2022 machines, according to an employee at third-party update service Heimdal.

“Our team discovered this discrepancy in our patch repository,” Andrei de Heimdal wrote via Reddit “because the Windows Server 2025 upgrade GUID does not match the usual entries for KB5044284 associated with Windows 11. This appears to be an error on Microsoft’s side, affecting both the release speed and classification of the update After cross-checking with Microsoft’s KB repository, we confirmed that the KB number is correct. referring 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 system operating system to Windows Server 2022 if they do not have third-party solutions offering system restore functionality from previously made backups.