What could cause an XML file to be filled with null characters?

Question

This is a tricky question. I suspect it will require some advanced knowledge of file systems to answer.

I have a WPF application, \"App1,\" targeting .NET framework

Answer 1

I ran into a similar issue but it was on a server. The server restarted while a program was writing to a file which caused the file to contain all null characters and become unusable to the program writing/reading from it.

So the file looked like this:

The logs showed that the server restarted:

The corrupted file showed that it was last updated at the time of the restart: