Microsoft cancels February Patch Tuesday despite 0-day in wild

Enlarge (credit: Jonny Hunter)

As the second Tuesday of the month, Valentines Day should have been a day for patches in addition to lovers; there's a known and widely publicized crashing flaw in Microsoft's SMB file-sharing protocol, and a fix for this bug (and, no doubt, several others) is widely anticipated. A few hours before the patches were due to go live, Microsoft announced that they were "delayed" due to an unspecified "last-minute issue."

The company now says that this delay means that the patches won't be coming in February at all. Instead, they'll be rolled into March's update, which should arrive on March 14.

As well as the SMB fix, the now-March update will change the way patches are delivered for Windows 7, 8.1, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, and Server 2012 R2: Internet Explorer's updates will now be delivered in a separate package from the OS fixes.

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