For Always On VPN administrators using the Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) on Windows Server 2025, you’ve likely encountered issues with service restarts and system reboots since migrating to the latest release of the Windows server operating system. I’ve experienced this myself, and many of my customers and Discord users have raised the same complaints.

Important Note! The fix for this issue is included in the April 2026 security updates. See below for more details.

Service Hang

Attempting to restart the RemoteAccess service after the server has accepted at least one VPN connection causes the service to hang. In addition, many have reported that the server hangs and eventually blue-screens during a shutdown or restart.

Resolution

Microsoft included a fix for this issue in the April 2026 security updates. However, the fix is not enabled by default. After applying the April 2026 updates, administrators must activate the fix by setting the following registry key.

Key: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides\
Name: 3247592078
Type: DWORD
Value: 1

You can enable this setting by opening an elevated PowerShell command window and running the folowing commands.

New-Item -Path 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides' -Force
Set-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides' -Name '3247592078' -Value 1 -Type DWORD -Force

Once the registry has been updated, reboot the server for the change to take effect.

Additional Information

Always On VPN on Discord

Windows Server Insider Builds