If the Windows 'update and shut down' option restarts your PC instead, it's not just you
You aren't losing it, you really did tell Windows to shut down.
Have you ever seen the Windows login screen on your monitor and thought, "Wait a minute, didn't I tell it to shut down?"
For a while, I doubted myself: Maybe I had told Windows to "update and restart" instead of "update and shut down." And maybe I should go check the burners on the stove, because clearly I can't be trusted with on/off states.
But no, it wasn't me. When I mentioned this experience in a meeting recently, another PC Gamer editor said, Wait a minute, you too?
Windows has been doing this since at least 2021, when someone asked what was up with their PC restarting instead of shutting down after updates on the official Windows forum. Then, about eight months ago, a dozen people reported the problem in a Reddit thread. That's around the time it started happening for me.
Some say it happens whenever Windows needs to restart multiple times to apply an update, but I'm not sure about that—seems like it just restarts once, regardless of whether I tell it to update and shut down or update and restart. Back in that 2021 thread, someone said it was a BIOS issue, so you might try updating your motherboard's firmware, but I can't say whether or not that's definitely the problem, either.
Ironically, go back far enough in the Google search results and you can find someone complaining that the update and shut down feature does what it says it does. Rather than restarting to finish the update, it was leaving the PC shut down and finishing the update on the next boot.
Fair enough—that's also not ideal. The best version of the system would reboot as many times as needed and then 'remember' to shut down as requested. That seems to be how it's meant to work in Windows 11. But it doesn't.
I can't find any official Microsoft support comment on the matter, but on the chance that it's my fault for being lazy about motherboard maintenance, I'll refrain from ranting about Windows 11 bugs here.
Mainly, I just wanted to let people who've experienced this know that they haven't lost their grip on reality. You did lock your car. You did turn off the oven. And you did click "update and shut down."