What does NTSTATUS 0xC0000374 (STATUS_HEAP_CORRUPTION) mean?

STATUS_HEAP_CORRUPTION

The heap manager detected corrupted heap state

STATUS_HEAP_CORRUPTION (0xC0000374) means heap consistency checks found damaged allocation state. The instruction that detects the corruption is often not the instruction that caused it: an earlier out-of-bounds write, use-after-free, double free, invalid heap handle, or race can corrupt metadata and remain latent until a later allocation or release.

Evidence to collect

• Capture a dump at the first detected corruption and retain the heap address, allocation/free stacks when available, faulting thread, and module versions.
• Reproduce with page heap, Application Verifier heap checks, or another suitable memory-safety instrument so the debugger breaks closer to the corrupting access.
• Compare allocation ownership and lifetime across threads; do not assume the component calling HeapAlloc or HeapFree at detection time caused the damage.

Recovery

Correct the memory-lifetime or bounds defect and rerun the same workload under heap verification. Restarting the process can clear corrupted heap state, but it is only operational recovery; it does not repair the defect that produced STATUS_HEAP_CORRUPTION.

Official references

• Microsoft Open Specifications: NTSTATUS values
• Microsoft: GFlags and PageHeap