14 DAY TRIAL // The first Patch Tuesday cycle of the year takes place tomorrow, but this won’t be the typical monthly rollout, but one particularly busy due to the Meltdown & Spectre fiasco impacting chips from Intel, AMD, and ARM.
The hardware flaw that was made public last week triggered an avalanche of emergency patches from several companies, including Microsoft, with the software giant pushing Meltdown & Spectre fixes for Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7, Surface devices, and Windows phones.
The Windows 10 patches were shipped in the form of cumulative updates that included some other bug fixes and improvements as well, and while this could be an indication no other cumulative updates would land on Patch Tuesday, that’s unlikely to be the case because of two reasons.
Fixes for botched updates
First of all, the cumulative updates shipped to the Creators Update and older versions only included security fixes for the two hardware bugs, and Patch Tuesday is typically about more than that, with other security refinements and improvements also part of the rollout.
Second of all, the cumulative update released by Microsoft for the Windows 10 Creators Update and supposed to fix the Meltdown & Spectre vulnerabilities failed to install on a series of older AMD chips, and the company is now expected to fix the problem with the release of another update tomorrow.
As for Windows 7 and 8.1 users, Microsoft will finally make the hardware patches available via Windows Update, as last week the company only published them in the Update Catalog. Everyone will thus receive the updates starting tomorrow.
And last but not least, Microsoft has one more big issue to address, as the Windows 7 Meltdown & Spectre patch appears to be causing BSODs on AMD systems with older processors, so before publishing it on Windows Update, the company needs to make sure everything’s working flawlessly.
Without a doubt, it’s going to be one interesting Patch Tuesday rollout this month, and with so many critical bugs to fix, it’ll be a challenge for Microsoft to get everything right.