Firewall unable to turn on (Windows Error code 0x80070422)

An odd issue, Windows Firewall was automatically off. This impacted a user who had numerous issues with their computer. The issue wasn’t hard to fix, but was certainly not easy to find a fix for.

A co-worker approached me asking for help to troubleshoot the firewall issue. We employ GPO for the firewall, but to my knowledge we do not disable the firewall.

After looking, it was obvious that this was no GPO that disabled the firewall. However, when we went to enable it we got an error code that the firewall could not be re-enabled, with error code 0x80070422.

 

After some digging, we discovered that the firewall was disabled automatically via Services. We simply had to choose “Automatic” for startup, then start the firewall through Services.

 

Once that was done, we checked back on the firewall. Sure enough, the Firewall was re-enabled. We restarted the computer to ensure that the firewall would automatically start, which it did.

Keep in mind, you must be an administrator to make changes to services.

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