Surface Pro 11 camera issue on sign in from sleep/hibernation - "Couldn't turn on camera - please sign in with PIN"

I have a Surface Pro (11) 5G with fully current Windows 11, OS and Drivers. For months now, I have been having an issue where Windows Hello face detection stops working, forcing me to use the pin.

After a fresh reboot, Windows Hello face detection works the way it is supposed to. So, it is not a setup issue or corrupt biometric data.

When Windows hello is working properly, I see the camera light turn on and then the IR camera activate. When it stops working, the cameral light still activates, but the IR camera does not. After a few seconds I get the "Sorry something went wrong message", and it falls back to the pin login.

The camera app can access the camera just fine. Teams and Zoom work with video no issue. Device manager doesn't show any issues with any devices and reports I am using the current drivers for the cameras, biometric device, etc. Anyone come across a fix or is there a known way to kickstart the IR cameral / Hello without rebooting?

After reading a few comments, I decided to try the "Improve Recognition" and noticed it doesn't work when Windows Hello doesn't work. I thought maybe it would force the IR camera on, but it doesn't. Just shows my face and never does the face detection with the green box and dots. The only thing the Improve Recognition box does is allow you to cancel.

I decided to uninstall and reinstall the IR driver without a reboot. When I went back to Improve Recognition, it spins for second and then crashes. Device manager still says the IR Camera is working properly.

I have the same problem on my Surface Pro 11 X1 Elite. If I delete Surface IR camera in device manager and let it reinstall by scanning for hardware changes, it will work for a day or two, then the problem appears again. It is on the latest Windows 11 25H2 stable release. Quite annoying. I don't have this problem on my Surface Pro 8.

Basically Microsoft have no clue what to do hence no solution... pay over £1500 for a laptop and it can't get the camera working properly... lovely!

I've been dealing with the same issue for months. Any solutions?

I have the same issue on my Surface Pro 11 ARM 25H2 (26200.7462). This has been bugging me for months and I'm closely following updates and discussing and tracking (together with AI) what the progress on this is. Clearly not an individual hardware issue. In my case there is a 100% relation with the Windows Camera Frame Server crash. This is easily seen in Reliability History.
I tried building a script in powershell to try and restart all services related to the BioMetric and camera services with no luck. As soon as this ocurs a reboot is required. And then it works for a few days. If you disable Hibernate it seems to happen less, but can't confirm this 100%.

Together with my troubleshooting with AI we came up to the following summary of the problem:

On Surface Pro 11 (Snapdragon X Elite) running the latest Windows 11 25H2 builds (including 26200.7462), Windows Hello facial recognition stops working after a few hours/days with the message "Couldn't turn on the camera" or silently (no error shown).

The camera itself works fine in the Camera app, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. The issue consistently returns after sleep, hibernation, or simply over time. Root cause: Repeated APPCRASH in Windows Camera Frame Server (svchost.exe_FrameServer) with faulting module ntdll.dll and exception code c0000005. Multiple users report the exact same behavior, indicating a software/driver conflict in 25H2 rather than individual hardware defects.

Why a full reboot (and not just restarting services) is required:

The Windows Camera Frame Server runs inside a shared svchost.exe process. When the access violation (c0000005) occurs in ntdll.dll, the memory/state of the entire host process becomes corrupted. Windows cannot cleanly restart just that instance without terminating the whole svchost host, which only happens reliably during a full system reboot. A reboot fully unloads and reloads the service, clears memory, and re-initializes drivers — temporarily stable until the conflict builds up again (often triggered by power state changes or app camera access).

The reference to the Surface Pro 11 may be a bit too specific, but to me this is unknown.

Great summary Peter! Now, if only Microsoft would give us some advice other than resetting our PC to factory defaults.

I agree. Also, has anybody tried the factory reset? Does it even fix anything? Asking us to send the table in for repairs is also not helpful, since the issue seems to be software related.

Well, I recently thought it had stabilized, had not seen the error in a few weeks.
Normally it was related to Hibernate (in my case), but yesterday I had it originated from the Teams Client that simply blew up the camera (reboot required and being late for a meeting, showing up on my phone...)

Exact same issue on my Surface Pro 11 LCD. Has been the case for at least 6 months. In the device manager, I've tried disabling the option allowing the system to save energy on the IR sensor. This seemed to help for a few days. However, the setting resets itself automatically after some time (maybe after hibernation), so this is not a viable solution.