Why a stream from your own computer stops overnight

The stream was up when you went to bed and gone when you woke up. Somewhere in the night the machine restarted itself to finish installing an update, or the Mac it was running on went to sleep, and whatever was doing the broadcasting stopped running.

What you want to know is whether you can stop it happening again. The documentation supports a narrower answer than most of what gets written about this: you can move the window in which your computer maintains itself. You cannot remove it.

Everything below comes from Microsoft’s and Apple’s own pages, linked where the fact appears and listed again at the foot with the date each was read. Anything that came from somewhere else is labelled where it appears. Where the documentation leaves a question open, and the most important one here is left open, this says so rather than filling the gap.

The short answer

A home PC installs updates by itself, and finishing one takes a restart. You can tell Windows which hours to leave alone, and the most it will leave alone is eighteen of the twenty-four. Apple does not document an unmanaged Mac restarting itself for a macOS update, but it does document a Mac falling asleep, and there is a setting that stops that. Neither vendor publishes a way to make a computer never interrupt itself.

What stops the stream	What you can do about it
Windows restarts to finish an update	Set active hours. That moves the restart; it does not cancel it.
Your edition has no setting for the restart	Nothing, on Windows Home. Those settings are documented for Pro and above.
Your Mac falls asleep on its own	Turn on “Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off”, in Energy or Battery settings.
The laptop lid gets closed	Leave the display open. Closing it is one of the ways Apple lists to put a Mac to sleep.
The machine comes back from a restart	Something has to start the broadcast again, and nothing is live until it does.

Does a home PC really install updates on its own?

Microsoft’s consumer FAQ puts the default plainly: “Windows 11 automatically downloads and installs updates to make sure your device is secure and up to date.”

You might assume that is something imposed on office machines by an IT department, and that a PC in a spare room is left alone. Microsoft documents it the other way round:

Automatic feature updates are offered only to consumer devices and non-managed business devices running Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Only. Automatic is what an ordinary home PC does, and the managed fleets are the ones with the machinery to defer.

That quotation is about feature updates specifically, but the policy reference documents the same default for updating in general: “If the policy isn’t configured, end-users get the default behavior (Auto install and restart).” An unconfigured machine installs and restarts. The FAQ then closes the exit:

You can’t stop updates entirely—because they help keep your device safe and secure, updates will eventually need to be installed and downloaded, regardless of your update settings.

“Regardless of your update settings” is Microsoft’s phrasing, not a paraphrase.

When does Windows decide to restart?

Finishing an update takes a restart, and Windows carries it out:

To finish installing an update, your device will need to restart. Windows will try to restart your device when you’re not using it. If it can’t, you’ll be asked to schedule the restart for a more convenient time.

Read “will try to” as written. The hedge is Microsoft’s, not ours.

Then read when you’re not using it, because that is where this stops being answerable. Microsoft does not define the phrase anywhere we could find: no page says whether a foreground application counts, or audio playing, or the software doing the broadcasting working flat out, or an open connection to YouTube. Whether a running stream is enough to make Windows leave the machine alone is not written down. Assuming it does is how people end up surprised at four in the morning.

How many hours a night is your stream exposed?

The setting everyone reaches for is active hours:

Active hours identify the period of time when you expect the device to be in use. Automatic restarts after an update occur outside of the active hours.

Note outside. Your exposure is 24 hours minus your active hours, and the documented default window is short: “By default, active hours are from 8 AM to 5 PM on PCs. Users can manually change the active hours.”

Nine hours in, fifteen out: fifteen hours every night in which Windows will attempt a restart if an update is waiting.

Take that as a documented default, not a measurement of your machine. The 8-to-5 figure comes from Microsoft’s page for IT administrators. The consumer page a home user lands on never states a default: it offers two modes, set the hours yourself or “Have Windows automatically adjust active hours based on your device’s activity”, without saying which a new PC ships with. On automatic adjustment your window is whatever Windows decided, and Microsoft does not publish what range that mode may pick.

Can you make that window any smaller?

Six hours is the floor, and you only reach it deliberately. Active hours has a ceiling: “The max active hours length for Windows 10, version 1607 and Windows Server 2016 is 12. Later versions support max active hours length of 18 hours.” Eighteen is also the shipped default, holding until somebody changes it: “the default max active hours range is 18 hours from the active hours start time unless otherwise configured”.

Twenty-four minus eighteen is six. That arithmetic is ours; Microsoft never writes “six hours” anywhere, and the ceiling it documents is for active hours you set yourself. By default it is fifteen hours a night. Tuned as hard as Windows allows, it is still six.

People do report restarts they thought they had prevented. On Microsoft’s own Q&A site in May 2024, a Windows Home user describes an update installing and rebooting their machine overnight while updates were paused — “I should not be getting Windows updates at all” — and then running into the 18-hour ceiling when they turned to active hours instead. Their machine was asleep at the time rather than streaming. One account is not evidence of a fault, and we found nothing primary that contradicts the documented behaviour.

Does active hours cancel the restart, or move it?

It moves one. It does not cancel one:

After Windows installs an update, it attempts to automatically restart outside of active hours. If the restart doesn’t succeed after a default period of seven days, the user sees a notification that a restart is required.

After a week, Windows stops waiting for a convenient moment and starts asking you to pick one.

Can you pause updates instead?

Updates can be paused: “You can pause updates for up to 35 days from the current date.” That is a real reprieve before a month you need undisturbed. It is also a delay by design — “When you pause updates, you’re temporarily delaying updates until the date you choose. This doesn’t permanently turn off automatic updates” — and it ends by itself if you forget about it. That same page carries the clearest consumer-facing admission of what happens the rest of the time, and it is the word until that carries it: “Your device won’t restart automatically to finish installation of the updates until the pause ends.”

Whether you can keep renewing those 35 days reads at first like a contradiction. The FAQ says that “after the pause limit is reached, you’ll need to install the latest updates before you can pause updates again”, while the pausing article says you “can extend a pause again later, as long as the new end date is within 35 days from the current date”. Both are true of different moments. Extend while a pause is still running and the clock re-bases on today: “The new end date can be up to 35 days from today (previously paused time doesn’t get added on).” Let one lapse and you install before you can pause again. So a pause renews indefinitely, as long as you never forget. It is a delay you keep paying for rather than an off switch.

What about the settings Windows Home does not have?

Past pausing and active hours, the settings that actually govern restart behaviour are documented as applying to Pro, Enterprise, Education and IoT Enterprise. Home is not on the list.

There is a registry route, and Microsoft tells you not to take it: “Directly editing the Windows registry isn’t recommended”, and on active hours specifically, “This method isn’t recommended, and should only be used when you can’t use group policy or MDM.” Our view rather than Microsoft’s: this is where a non-technical reader should stop. You would be hand-editing the registry of the machine your broadcast depends on, to reach settings your edition is not documented to honour.

Isn’t there a setting that stops restarts completely?

There is a policy called “No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installation”. It is what people find when they go looking for a way to stop this. Microsoft’s note on it:

The No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installation policy was never created as a CSP. In Group Policy this policy doesn’t work exactly as per description. This policy can result in no quality update reboots period, given many users never log off.

That middle sentence is easy to find on its own, and on its own it reads as this protection does not work. Read whole, the paragraph says the opposite: Microsoft’s complaint is that the policy works too well. It can suppress quality-update reboots entirely, because people stay signed in. The outcome Microsoft is warning against is the one a streamer is trying to buy.

What happens on a machine nobody is signed in to?

It still is not the answer, because of an exclusion that lands on the machine a 24/7 stream tends to become. Microsoft’s note on this same policy: “Devices that don’t have locally signed-in users, or active RDP sessions, are restarted.” The protection is for somebody sitting at the keyboard. A box in a cupboard with nobody signed into it is not covered.

Does a Mac restart itself the same way?

Apple does not document an unmanaged Mac restarting itself to install a macOS update, and we are not going to imply it does. The pages sit next to that claim without ever making it: you can turn automatic macOS updates on, installing one involves restarts (“During installation, your Mac might restart and show a progress bar or blank screen several times”), and there is an overnight path if you choose it — “To install downloaded updates overnight, click Update Tonight and make sure your Mac is turned on, connected to power, and connected to the internet overnight.” Choosing is the operative part, and Apple describes a fork you take: “you can choose to install the updates immediately, or choose to install the updates later that night”. For one class of update Apple states the reverse outright: “By default, these updates are installed or applied automatically. They don’t cause your Mac to restart, but some take effect only after you restart your Mac.”

How do you stop a Mac falling asleep?

Sleep is the Mac’s real failure mode, and that Apple documents properly. Closing the lid is one of the ways it lists to put a machine to sleep (“On a Mac laptop, close the display”), and there is a setting for the unattended case: you “can set your Mac to go to sleep after a specified duration of inactivity”.

The setting that stops it is worth quoting for its name, because the name is what you match against your own screen. On a desktop, open System Settings from the Apple menu, click Energy in the sidebar, and turn on “Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off”. On a laptop it lives under Battery: click Battery in the sidebar, then Options, and turn on “Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off”. Read those names closely. The screen is allowed to go dark while the machine stays awake behind it, and on a laptop that only holds on mains power, which the title says outright. Apple adds that “some of the options may not be available, depending on your Mac”, so if you do not see it, that is why.

What happens to a broadcast at the moment a Mac sleeps is not something Apple writes down, and we are not going to infer it. The part worth acting on sits upstream anyway: stop the machine falling asleep.

What happens when the machine comes back?

One person on the OBS forums, setting up a 24/7 YouTube stream on a machine that restarts on a schedule, describes OBS starting “automatically” when the PC comes back and “almost” starting to stream, “except that it has a pop-up to ‘manage broadcast’, meaning a person has to go to the computer and reconfigure the stream”. Their restarts were not even about Windows updates, and we have not verified the behaviour: it is a forum post, not documentation of how OBS behaves. But a restart from any cause leaves you in the same position, because something has to be there when the machine comes back.

So what do you actually do?

You can move the window, and Microsoft documents the ceiling on how far it moves. Neither vendor publishes a supported way to make a personal computer never interrupt itself, and neither platform is an escape from the other: Windows documents a restart it will attempt, Apple a sleep you have to go and switch off.

A machine you own has maintenance windows you do not fully control, and a broadcast meant to run for a month has to live inside them. The way out is a machine whose only job is the broadcast: a spare box you have set up and hardened yourself, or ours.

Questions people ask

Can I just turn Windows updates off?

No, and Microsoft says so itself: updates “will eventually need to be installed and downloaded, regardless of your update settings.” A workaround that gets you partway there leaves an internet-facing machine unpatched for the sake of a playlist, which is a bad trade.

Will Windows leave the machine alone while it is streaming?

Nobody can tell you, and that is the honest answer. Windows restarts “when you’re not using it”, and Microsoft does not define the phrase on any page we could find.

Is a Mac safer than a PC for this?

Not in the way people expect. A Mac that has fallen asleep has stopped broadcasting just as completely as one that restarted. Turn off automatic sleeping, and keep a laptop on mains power.

Every quotation above was read on 23 September 2026. Both vendors reword these articles without notice, so if you are reading this long after that date, open the pages and check them against what you see.