Xbox insider update resetting consoles to factory settings

The Xbox Insider program lets people test out upcoming updates early and people enrolled in the program are reporting a complete reset of their Xbox Series X and S consoles. This incident occurred for all users in the Alpha and Alpha Skip-Ahead tier following an update on March 6. Thankfully, the bug was caught early on before rolling to the masses.

As reported by VGC who is an Alpha tier in the Xbox Insider program, the update removed Xbox profiles, console settings, and Quick Resume data. It was also a mandatory update meaning people could not avoid it and had their data reset as a result.

“After the update was downloaded and installed, rather than simply updating the system software and rebooting to the Xbox dashboard as usual, our console instead loaded the initial setup procedure that runs when the console is used for the first time,” VGC wrote.

Many users experience a full Xbox factory reset

Reports of other people in the Alpha and Alpha Skip-Ahead tier facing complete reset also started occurring online. Many were confused about why this happened but the update was quickly found to be the reason, although it was too late to warn anyone.

The update also did not uninstall any Xbox games which was a relief. However, people still had to manually change all settings back to how they wanted which can get annoying, especially after spending hours customizing your device to perfection.

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What was the Xbox update for?

Massive bugs like this usually do not happen, even with the Alpha tier of the Xbox Insider program. The update was simply supposed to fix issues with profile viewing and Dolby Vision detection. Thankfully, this did not happen later down the road or there would be a lot of angry Xbox users.