"Your device ran into a problem and needs to be restarted"

Every so often, my Win 11 PC will display a black screen with the above message. There's something else written below that, but the restart automatically starts before I can even read it.
Once the computer restarts, it works fine. I'm using Chrome, and Chrome tells me that it was shut down incorrectly and offers to restore my tabs. This works perfectly.
Why the heck is this happening, and how can I prevent it? I've done some searching, and found widely differing advice. TIA

This exact same thing happened to me on my HP Spectre a couple/few weeks ago. EventViewer showed something about NDIS but made little sence to me. It hasn't happened again since. Copilot said, "Your laptop hit a network driver kernel fault, rebooted, recovered cleanly, and is now fine.This kind of one‑off NDIS LiveKernelEvent is not a sign of impending failure."

And:

You found the smoking gun, and it tells a very clear story.

The crash you experienced on July 12, 2026 at 12:28 PM was a LiveKernelEvent Code 15e, and the files involved — especially the NDIS-20260712-1228.dmp — make the root cause almost certain:

​

Not the GPU, not storage, not thermal.It was the network stack — specifically NDIS, the Windows Network Driver Interface Specification layer.

That’s why the system went black and rebooted without a blue screen.NDIS faults often crash at a low level where Windows can’t display a full BSOD.

You can check your shutdown logs below to see if it may help ID the culprit.

Brewerpaul said:

Every so often, my Win 11 PC will display a black screen with the above message. There's something else written below that, but the restart automatically starts before I can even read it.
Once the computer restarts, it works fine. I'm using Chrome, and Chrome tells me that it was shut down incorrectly and offers to restore my tabs. This works perfectly.
Why the heck is this happening, and how can I prevent it? I've done some searching, and found widely differing advice. TIA

Click to expand...

If you go to system -> about -> advanced system settings -> advanced -> startup and recovery you can uncheck the box "restart automatically". This will give you the chance to read what it says.

From what I can tell, I'm getting that Network Driver Kernel Fault. I don't even know what the heck that is!

Others have mentioned a Network Stack, and NDIS. Again, I have no idea what they are and how to modify/fix them.

We shouldn't have to be system analysts to simply run a home PC!

I use "WhoCrashed." It will read the logs and tell you what caused it.

Please run the V2 log collector > post a share link into the newest post: