Microsoft delays Patch Tuesday as SMB fix still fails to arrive

Update tumbleweed

Microsoft has delayed Patch Tuesday - that second Tuesday of the month tradition in which Windows receives its update patches.

The company's announcement came via a short, to-the-point post on its TechNet blog, simply stating that "this month, we discovered a last minute issue that could impact some customers and was not resolved in time for our planned updates today".

"After considering all options, we made the decision to delay this month's updates. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this change to the existing plan," the blog continued.

It's believable that the issue may be around the Windows Server SMB zero-day exploit, which the company apparently knew about for three months, but which got released into the wild a couple of weeks back.

It's a potential huge problem for a lot of users, and Patch Tuesday would have been the event many were hanging on to see it resolved.

Instead, perhaps Microsoft is still working on this clearly challenging fix, and has delayed Patch Tuesday for just that reason.

There's no actual ETA for Patch Tuesday yet, which is unsettling,

There are also theories that Patch Tuesday may be being skipped today to better align it with Microsoft's new "Monthly Rollup" update scheme, which the company laid out plans for last year.

Here, Windows 7, 8.1, and Server editions get two updates a month as a "Monthly Rollup" and a "Security Only" set of updates.

"Security Only" is only going to contain non-Internet Explorer patches from February 2017, to keep the file size down.

So again, it's possible that this ambitious rollout may have hit a snag and somehow affected the usual Patch Tuesday rollout - perceivably, users could end up with the wrong kind of patches in the wrong bundles if something isn't configured correctly.

It's probably best to sit tight for both the SMB fix and Patch Tuesday, as Microsoft is saying nothing about either for now.