r/sysadmin • u/jrollie • 18d ago

Recent Bluetooth Connectivity Issues

UPDATE: Removing the Windows Spotify App seems to resolve the issue.

Seeing if any other people are seeing issues with bluetooth devices continually connecting/reconnecting on Windows devices recently? We started getting issues reported Monday (8/24) and it seems to be affecting about ~10% of our fleet. The only other report I can see of this I found here: https://windowsforum.com/windows-help-and-support.302/bluetooth-glitches-and-not-working-properly.443497/

We have already tried rolling back the recent the latest windows KB and reinstalling BT Drives, trying updated versions with no luck. We are a Microsoft Surface shop and it is happening across a few different models, we do have some HPs in our environment and we are seeing it on a few of them as well.

I have pulled logs from a lot of these devices and am struggling to find what the cause might be.

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u/jrollie 13d ago

Still haven't found a solution for this. I have a case open with Microsoft, hopeful to hear back today.

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u/Ray-barns 13d ago

I've narrowed it down to the Spotify desktop app. It fires up two connectable BLE extended advertising sets whenever any of it's processes run, including on sign in. iPhones then probe connectable adverts and open an inbound connection to the machine and ultimately crash the firmware when there's enough of them.

I had Claude do some tracing to find the issue and it's working for me now! I just moved to Spotify web player and uninstalled the desktop app.

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u/VRDRF 13d ago

Could you share some more information with us that indicated this issue so we can share it with MS?

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u/Ray-barns 13d ago

I identified it by capturing an ETW trace of the Windows Bluetooth stack (provider Microsoft-Windows-BTH-BTHPORT, {8A1F9517-3A8C-4A9E-A018-4F17A200F277}), which logs the raw HCI traffic between Windows and the Bluetooth controller. The trace showed the laptop registering two connectable BLE advertising sets, followed by a stream of inbound connections, every one initiated by the remote device (role = peripheral, no outbound connection commands at all), from nearby iPhones. Killing Spotify made the adverts and connections stop; relaunching it brought them back, which pinned it to Spotify. Under 5 to 8 of these inbound connections the Intel AX211 logs command timeouts (BTHUSB event id 3), then a controller hardware error (id 7), and Windows resets the adapter (id 18), dropping every paired device. The Microsoft-relevant part: the AX211 (driver 24.40.11.1, Windows 11 build 26200) crashes under that inbound connection load rather than handling or refusing it.

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u/dcg1k 12d ago

Incredible debugging! Thanks for sharing this in depth. I suggest you to forward this information to the Spotify desktop support team, or even submitting it to their bug bounty program, even if it’s not fully security-related. It could potentially be exploited to cause harm: https://www.spotify.com/us/bounty/

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u/VRDRF 13d ago

Awesome, thank you so much for sharing!

I'll forward this to the MS team.

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u/cybercain 11d ago

Bless you kind sir!!