Microsoft Has The Patch Tuesday Blues With Buggy Updates

This month’s Patch Tuesday has been far from smooth for Microsoft, as it has rushed to fix various problems with the security updates.

Having already pulled an Office 2013 UI update for Outlook because in certain cases it rendered the Navigation pane in Outlook unusable, it also received complaints about repeated notifications for updates, even after they had been downloaded.

Patch Tuesday problems

“We are aware of issues in the detection logic that causes these updates to appear as needed after installation,” the company said in a Q&A.

“This issue is in the detection logic of the update only. The updates themselves do address the issues described in their associated bulletins.

“These issues have been resolved through revised updates released on 13 September 2013. These are detection changes only. There were no changes to the update files. Customers who have successfully installed the updates do not need to take any action.”

Last month wasn’t straightforward for Microsoft either. It had to pull one of its critical updates as it was corrupting mailbox databases for Exchange Server 2013 users.

Some security experts believe such problems with patching are a result of the complexity of IT environments in modern infrastructure.

“Any failure in patching is impacting our efforts to improve security by frequent updating,” said Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, in a blog post last week.

“Ultimately I believe that reducing the complexity on the desktop and using more online services for our daily needs is the direction that we are headed.”

Are you a security expert? Try our quiz!