Systems and methods for preventing violations of minimum pulse width requirements that may cause damage to PWM amplifiers. One embodiment comprises a digital PWM amplifier that includes shutdown circuitry which is configured to identify blockout intervals during which deassertion of the PWM signals would cause the generation of below-minimum-width pulses in the signals. Each blockout interval may, for example, begin 1 minimum pulse width before and end 1 minimum pulse width after a rising/falling edge the PWM signals. If a shutdown signal is asserted (or deasserted) during one of the blockout intervals, the PWM signals are deasserted (or reasserted) at the end of the blockout interval.