What does Windows error code 13878 (ERROR_IPSEC_IKE_BENIGN_REINIT) mean?

ERROR_IPSEC_IKE_BENIGN_REINIT

The temporary state is intentionally not treated as a failure

The built-in status text explicitly marks this as a nonfailure. Windows creates temporary state while reinitializing the IKE subsystem, so an observer can see this code during lifecycle work even though no peer has rejected negotiation and no protected packet has failed integrity checks.

The correct diagnostic response is to determine why reinitialization occurred and whether it completed. Service restart, policy refresh, or subsystem configuration change can legitimately rebuild state. Escalate only when reinitialization loops, established SAs repeatedly disappear, or a later specific error prevents negotiations from recovering.

What to inspect

• Check service and IPsec policy-change events immediately before the status.
• Confirm that new Main Mode and Quick Mode SAs can be established after reinitialization.
• Do not classify this code alone as a tunnel outage; correlate it with actual SA and traffic state.

Get-NetIPsecMainModeSA
Get-NetIPsecQuickModeSA

References

• Microsoft: IPsec audit events
• Microsoft: Get-NetIPsecMainModeSA
• Microsoft: Get-NetIPsecQuickModeSA