Microsoft Mistakenly Offers Windows 11 Upgrade to Unsupported PCs (Again)

Did you receive an offer to upgrade to Windows 11 last week—even though your PC doesn’t officially support it? It turns out the free upgrade was offered by mistake. 

Microsoft has fixed(Opens in a new window) a bug that resulted in the company sending out “an inaccurate upgrade” opportunity to users still on Windows 10. It’s at least the second time the company has done this.

In the most recent incident, Twitter user @PhantomOfEarth noticed(Opens in a new window) a free Windows 11 upgrade offer pop up for his virtual machine, which was still on Windows 10 22H2. However, his system only runs 2GB of RAM, which is under the 4GB requirement for Windows 11. In addition, the virtual machine lacked the necessary Trusted Platform Module or TPM chip —another major requirement, which prevents PCs older than five years from upgrading to the OS.   

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Microsoft seems to have sent out the upgrade offer to numerous PCs. “Over the last few hours we have had a surge of threads in which various users are reporting that their computer is now eligible for the Windows 11 upgrade, despite not meeting the hardware requirements,” wrote(Opens in a new window) a moderator on the Reddit forum devoted to Windows 11. 

Microsoft was quick to identify the problem and roll out a fix. “Some hardware ineligible Windows 10 and Windows 11, version 21H2 devices were offered an inaccurate upgrade to Windows 11,” the company wrote in the bug report. “These ineligible devices did not meet the minimum requirements(Opens in a new window) to run Windows 11.”

The company also notes that accepting the upgrade opportunity failed to actually install Windows 11 on the unsupported PC. So it wasn’t a loophole to get the OS. That said, you can manually install Windows 11 on an unsupported device, although some users are reporting(Opens in a new window) Microsoft can display a watermark about the missing hardware requirements.