Can power outage corrupt Windows?

Ishit Singh · April 25, 2020

Today it was my first time experiencing power outage while my PC was running. I have a UPS and bought it just for this case but sadly nothing went as expected. I thought power will come back shortly within 1-2 mins but it took almost 15 mins and I was playing Destiny 2 Crucible so I let my PC run on UPS battery, after 5 mins my UPS forced my PC to restart itself and made it stuck in windows bootloop so I had to force shutdown (Holding power button).

What's strange is that after force shutdown and powering on PC again, it fixed bootloop but now i'm worried that I somehow corrupt windows since my PC first restarted itself after power outage and then I force shutdown while it was in middle of boot.

I'm newb when it comes to PC and would appreciate a lot if anyone could help me.

C2dan88 · April 25, 2020

If it is booting backing into Windows without any problems then no you have not corrupt Windows.

Worstcaster · April 25, 2020

C2dan88 is right. Also for a future power outages, consider the UPS as buying you time to get to a point your can save your work (or game) and then safely power down your system.

LogicalDrm · April 26, 2020

Point of UPS is to give you time to shutdown system, not to game while power is out. You will need unit with big battery to achieve power usage on it.

Yes, Windows can corrupt because of sudden shutdown. But usually this will happen when there's update in progress. In other words same style as all other files can corrupt.