Microsoft admits a default Windows 11 feature is quietly gobbling up massive disk space

Microsoft has acknowledged Windows 11's Capability Access Manager is indeed eating up massive amounts of storage space.

Last week Microsoft released Windows 11 C-release updates for versions 24H2 and 25H2 under KB5095093, followed up by setup and recovery dynamic updates under KB5102558 and KB5095615.

Although not initially stated in the release notes, Microsoft later added a couple of additional points to the changelog. The company confirmed that File Explorer is about to get snappier when users mount disk images. You may not see it immediately though as this feature is part of its gradual rollout approach. The other change however is coming to all users as a normal rollout since it has been a major issue that the tech giant has acknowledged.

The update is related to a feature called Capability Access Manager, and many users online over the last few months have been complaining about its unusual behaviour wherein they have noticed a massive amount of storage use-up as a result of it.

The issue was first brought to attention by user named Donald Gibson who expressed their disappointment on the official Microsoft support forum where they said that the Microsoft support team apparently had not got a clue what was happening. The user noticed that a massive 70GB of additional space was being taken by this default CapabilityAccessManager service. Many others were clearly facing the issue too as the thread at the of writing has been upvoted by over 80 people.

Following that report many others started popping up across the web. Finally though, Microsoft seems to have figured out the issue and as such the changelog for KB5095093 has been updated to reflect the fix that's rolling out currently. Here's what it says:

"June 29, 2026: Update added (normal rollout): [Storage] This update improves disk space usage for the CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal file.

 

June 23, 2026: Update added (gradual rollout): [File Explorer] This update improves File Explorer responsiveness when mounting disk images."

Thus the disk hogging issue should be resolved once you install the KB5095093 update. Additionally, the KB also has a GIF-related modification as Tenor has been replaced by GIPHY as the GIF provider in the Windows Emoji Panel.

Source: Microsoft via Microsoft forum (link1, link2, link3, link4, link5)

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Posted Thursday 2 July 2026 at 8:24 am AEST (my time).

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