Stop Active Directory Services Using PowerShell

In this blog post, I will show you how to stop Active Directory domain services using PowerShell and stop users from authenticating to a domain controller.

This feature is good in case you might need to perform maintenance on a domain controller of you might need to do a disaster recovery test.

Restartable Active Directory

Back in the days of Windows Server 2012, Microsoft made Active Directory domain services a service that can be restarted.

Check Service

To start, let’s check the AD service first using the following cmdlet.

Get-Service -DisplayName 'Active Directory Domain Services'

Stop Active Directory

To stop the Active Directory domain services on a domain controller, I will run the following cmdlet.

stop-Service -DisplayName 'Active Directory Domain Services' -Force