If your Brother printer stopped printing, scanning, or even showing up on your PC right after a Windows update, the printer usually isn't broken. Windows has most likely lost track of the driver or the print queue during the update, and both are fixable in a few minutes.
Why This Happens So Often
This isn't a rare glitch. Search Microsoft's own community forums and you'll find dozens of threads from Brother owners describing the same moment: everything printed fine the night before, a Windows update installed overnight, and the printer went offline, vanished from the printer list, or started throwing a driver error.
Windows updates routinely touch print drivers, security settings, and background services all at once, and Brother's drivers are sensitive to all three. The fixes below are well documented and usually take less than fifteen minutes.
What's Actually Causing It
- Windows Protected Print Mode is blocking the driver. This security feature, part of newer Windows 11 updates, only allows drivers Microsoft has verified as compliant. Brother has confirmed it can silently disable drivers it doesn't yet recognize.
- The print spooler got corrupted mid-update. If a Windows update restarts or interrupts background services, the spooler can get stuck, which shows up as jammed jobs or a printer that never leaves "offline."
- Windows swapped in a generic driver. Some updates quietly replace the Brother-specific driver with a generic one that connects but won't scan or use tray and paper settings correctly.
- The driver Windows used to supply is gone. As of January 15, 2026, Microsoft stopped pushing new versions of older driver types (known as V3 and V4) through Windows Update. Some Brother models now need the driver installed directly from Brother instead of waiting for Windows to supply it.
How to Fix a Brother Printer After a Windows Update
Work through these in order. Most people are back to printing after the first two or three.
1. Restart the printer and the PC
Turn the printer off at the power switch, unplug it for 30 seconds, and turn it back on. Then restart the PC. This clears temporary glitches the update may have left in the connection.
2. Restart the Print Spooler service
Press Windows key + R, type services.msc, and press Enter. Find Print Spooler, right-click it, and choose Restart. If jobs are still stuck, stop the service, clear the files in C:\Windows\System32\spool\printers, then start it again.
3. Turn off Windows Protected Print Mode
Go to Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Printers & scanners, scroll to Printer preferences, and turn off Windows Protected Print Mode. This is the fix Brother's own support team recommends for this exact symptom.
4. Reinstall the driver from Brother's website
Uninstall the current Brother driver and software first. Then go to Brother's Downloads page, enter your exact model number, and download the full driver package for your version of Windows. A clean reinstall resolves this far more reliably than patching the existing driver.
5. Update the driver through Device Manager
Open Device Manager, expand Print Queues, right-click your Brother printer, and choose Update driver, then Search automatically. This sometimes finds a compatible driver even when a manual install hasn't.
6. Uninstall the update, as a last resort
Go to Settings > Windows Update > Update history > Uninstall updates and remove the most recent one. This buys time until a permanent fix ships, but Windows will reinstall the update eventually, so treat it as temporary.
