14 DAY TRIAL // The Microsoft Security Response Center Team apologized to users of Microsoft Office on Mac due to the confusion created over the December security updates for Office on Mac. According to Microsoft, the issues involved the accidental posting of the pre-release security updates, as a result of a human error. The Redmond Company became aware of the situation following customer feedback. Consequently, the pre-release security updates were removed.
"We've seen some questions from customers about some security updates that posted for a while today for Office for Mac that they didn't see any security bulletins for. I wanted to let you know that these weren't security updates related to this month's release or the two Word issues we've written about in Security Advisory 929433," revealed the MSRC Team.
The Redmond Company informed that it is still investigating the issues related to Office on Mac, but that currently, the investigations are still under way. While Microsoft failed to provide a date at which it expects the analysis to be finalized it did promise to make the updates available as soon as the releases will meet the necessary quality bar.
"The updates posted in error were pre-release binaries that had been staged internally as part of our testing for an upcoming release. Due to human error, they were accidentally published to the public websites before our full testing release process was complete. As soon as we discovered the error, we moved quickly to address it and remove the pre-release binaries from our public sites. Once our investigation into this issue is complete and we have security updates that meet our quality bar for release, we'll release those final security updates for all products affected along with a security bulletin. We're also taking steps to ensure a mistake like this doesn't happen again," concluded the MSRC team.