Avast just stopped working out of nowhere

Hello forum,

I was just watching Youtube videos for quite a while, when all of a sudden at ca. 1 AM (Austrian time), so about 30 minutes ago, the Avast symbol in the taskbar appeared a second time, so I had 2 Avast symbols next to each other, which never happened before so I found it quite weird. When I hovered my mouse cursor above the second symbol that had just appeared, it instantly disappeared again and at first I didn’t think much of it. But a few seconds later I got kinda worried so I wanted to check if everything is ok, so I clicked the first, original Avast symbol that is always there, and then that one also disappeared (except this time after a click instead of hovering over it). Then I checked the task manager and saw that only the Avast Behavior Shield and the Avast Service were running, the standard “Avast Antivirus” (AvastUI.exe) however was no longer running. I tried restarting it, but from then on it kept disappearing as soon as I hovered above the symbol.

Since I couldn’t do anything else about it, I just restarted my computer, and for the moment it’s running normally again, but as you can imagine I’m still pretty worried about what just happened. I don’t think I ever had Avast just stop working like that. Do you guys have any clue what that could have been?

Probably just a glitch.

Do you think that’s likely? Just like that, out of the blue? It’s not like I was doing anything on the computer that I didn’t do usually or something.

Repair Avast:

  1. Control Panel → Add/Remove programs → Avast
  2. Click on ‘Repair’.
  3. Follow instructions.
  4. Reboot.