But there were people who said that their system couldn’t boot after the failed update of Avast, namely the fact that some people reported winload.exe issues. If that’s the case and you can’t get into Windows no matter what you do, you have no other choice but to try System Restore or reload your OS.
So, will an official email be sent that provides a link to the good version? There are so many links in this thread and my trust in Avast is at Zero.
Official links: https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=189131.0
Hi, the emergency update here basically only changes a few bytes inside avastui.exe.
Even though very unexpected things have happened in the past, I really can not think of any complications that could cause problems elsewhere outside the avastui process (which is the user interface for avast).
Thanks, but I feel like they will just ignore this problem…
They have hardly ignored it, given that it has been fixed.
Just ran emergency updater, it started no gui on it, but I saw it in my task manager, it’s gone now, is it safe to restart now?
Yes, give it like 5 mins just to be safe after running.
I must have been saved a lot of misery, judging by the postings here, by my schedule … I typically get up and boot around mid-afternoon (EDT), and got the avast warning in its tool-tray icon. Opening the interface, I got that background-services notification which included a link to start the “missing” services, which I clicked.
The only iffy part was when Win then asked for permission to run two exes, one of which had “proxy” in its name (probably related to the emergency update). After a moment’s hesitation, I OKd both, rebooted, and afterwards avast and (as far as I can tell) the whole system were just fine again.
So I got probably the quickest and easiest repair right from within the interface itself. Probably a case of lucky timing relative to Avast’s release of the UI fix. Certainly I was never faced with anything triggering a panic reaction, simply because I missed out on the hours of waiting and trial-and-error that others went through.
My computer is now on fire, marching around and assimilating all technology in my house! I think something went wrong with the update!
Just kidding, everything’s fine.
The truth is: Avast Team couldn’t manage this crisis professionally. Seems that they don’t have an emergency plan against such a situation.
The first thing they had to do was deleting the buggy update. But, it was still downloadable for 12 hours after the first post. By this way they could prevent many people from updating corrupted version.
Avast Team please don’t be angry with me. There is a saying in my country “Real friends tell the truth”…
That works both ways. 
You were always protected it was just a communication glitch between the UI and the shields.
It was the message telling you that you were not protected that was incorrect.
On contrary, it was acknowledged and corrected by an emergency update.
Besides, in all time we got protection on and not a single user suffered from protection interruption.
The issue, as stated many times here in forum, was in the interface only (GUI) not receiving the correct info from the shields.
I agree with the frustration of others in this post!!! The symptoms would generally indicate a virus has taken over/shutdown Avast which caused me to panic. Avast (even though it said it was not working) had locked down my system restore so I was initially unable to restore to July 27th before the update. The only way for me to get around it was to download the “AswClear” file from Avast to completely remove Avast, and run it in “Safe Mode” and then do a System Restore to July 27th while in “Safe Mode”. My PC completed the restore without errors and I was back to version 12.1.2272. My license file was still gone, but I kept the key and reinserted it after the restore…all OK.
Just a tip…as soon as the PC restarted and was OK, I opened Avast and disabled the Auto Program Update in Settings. This is normally selected by default. This way I CAN DECIDE when to update!
As soon as my License expires…I’m done with Avast!!! >:(
Avast doesn’t lock down your SytemRestore,
I am still a little unsure about this I noticed that during the ‘issue’ I could not successfully run a ‘quick scan’ when it got to the Virus part it just hung on 6% and never moved. Obviously I put this down to the AVAST buggy update.
I think the guy who checked the update before pushing them to the public was at the beach that day, having a long island iced tea
Has this killed windows defender for anyone else? It was working fine before this issue but now it’s saying it has been blocked in group policy and the service won’t start.
One resident AV is all you should ever use. Sorry, there was a mention that Defender does interfere with Avast. Avast already protects you against Malware.
If you want additional protection against Malware check out Malwarebytes.
If you’re using Windows 10, then Defender is an AV and you should never use more than one resident AV.