Applies to: Sophos Home for Windows
What’s happening:
You receive a message stating “You are not protected! Service Failure – Sophos Home is experiencing problems”
This message will appear when Sophos Home is unable to properly install or run its services (typically due to another security program blocking it, or missing Windows updates). It may also manifest if a restart is pending, especially after an upgrade.
Ensure no other antivirus software is installed, and follow the What to do section to address the message.
What to do
Step by step guide
“Service Failure – Sophos Home is experiencing problems” message indicates that one or more Sophos Home services have been turned off on the local computer. This could be related to having turned services off during troubleshooting, or to a service that hasn’t properly installed and it is failing to start.
Fixing Service Failure message
1 – Click on your Sophos Home Shield in the system tray to open up Sophos Home
2 – Click Help –> Troubleshooting and click the arrow to show the advanced settings
3 – Turn off the Tamper Protection slider by clicking on it (it will turn gray)
4 – Click on Start and type Services
5 – Right click on Services –> run as administrator
6- Locate the Sophos Home services
7 – Check the Status section of each, if any of them is not Running, right-click on it –> Start
Note: Premium and Trial users, please also look for the HitmanPro.Alert service and ensure it is running (this service will not be present for Free users).
8 – Once the services have been restarted, Sophos Home will switch to green and protected
9 – Go back to step 3 and turn Tamper Protection back on to ensure your computer is secured
List of all Sophos Home Services
There are 14 services to check for Sophos Home Premium
There are 13 services to check for Sophos Home Free
HitmanPro.Alert service [Premium only]
Sophos Anti-Virus
Sophos AutoUpdate Service
Sophos Clean
Sophos Endpoint Defense Service
Sophos File Scanner Service
Sophos Health Service
Sophos MCS Agent
Sophos MCS Client
Sophos Network Threat Protection
Sophos Safestore
Sophos System Protection Service
Sophos Web Control Service
Sophos Web Filter {Windows 8.1 and 10 only}
Sophos Web Intelligence Service
Note: There are some additional services that run as needed, and that are not within the scope of this article. For example Sophos Anti-Virus status reporter and Sophos Web Intelligence Update Service – you may ignore them while troubleshooting this message.
Additional troubleshooting
If the services do not turn on / return errors, please ensure no other Antivirus software is present on the system, and that you are using an administrator account . If the problems persist, re-install Sophos home following these steps how to re-install sophos home