Microsoft has acknowledged a bug in Windows 11 that is causing a system service to abnormally consume large amounts of storage, leaving many users with drastically depleted Solid-State Drive (SSD) capacity.
The software giant confirmed that the flaw is in the Capability Access Manager (camsvc), a service responsible for managing app permissions for hardware such as cameras, microphones, location tracking and other system resources.
The glitch causes extreme growth of a SQLite Write-Ahead Log file named CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal.
Under normal operating conditions, these log files occupy a mere few megabytes. However, numerous affected users reported that the file had ballooned to between 70 and 80 gigabytes (GB).
In more extreme cases, some users discovered the log file had bloated to over 200GB, and even up to 500GB, causing available SSD space to plummet rapidly without any new files being added by the user.
The issue first gained traction when a user named Donald Gibson posted a report on the Microsoft Q&A forum, noting that the specific log file had consumed more than 66GB of his storage.
Following the initial post, a wave of other Windows 11 users ran disk space analysers like WinDirStat or TreeSize, only to discover their machines were suffering from the exact same symptom.
Reports also indicated that Windows Storage Settings was misreporting capacity usage, showing incorrect data in both the "Installed Apps" and "System & Reserved" categories.
As user complaints continued to mount, Microsoft officially confirmed the existence of the bug and subsequently released a hotfix bundled within the KB5095093 update.
The tech giant has urged all Windows 11 users to install the latest update immediately to prevent the rogue log file from expanding any further.
Microsoft has not disclosed technical details about what triggered the bug or why camsvc began continuously writing to the log file, stating only that the issue has been resolved in the latest release.
Source: Support Microsoft, techspot, Windows Latest, Learn Microsoft
