14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just confirmed issues with a series of Meltdown and Spectre security updates for Windows devices running on AMD chipsets, and the company temporarily pulled all these patches to prevent further issues on the impacted computers.
The software giant released Meltdown and Spectre fixes last week as part of an emergency rollout after flaws in Intel, AMD, and ARM chips were disclosed by Google, but several of them either failed to install or caused other issues, such as infinite BSOD loops, on AMD devices.
Windows 10 cumulative update KB4056892 was the first one impacted by such issues, and only a couple of days later, our readers confirmed that Windows 7 Meltdown and Spectre patch (KB4056894) was affected by the same bug as well.
Microsoft today confirmed issues on AMD devices, explaining in a support document that it decided to pause Windows OS updates on devices with impacted AMD processors until a fix is offered. The KB pages of each impacted update have been updated with the known issue (see KB4056892 for an example).
These updates have been temporarily pulled on specific AMD systems ONLY, and all the other devices can install them just fine.
Pulled updates
According to Microsoft, the following updates were said to be causing issues on systems with AMD processors and have been pulled temporarily until a fix is offered:
“Microsoft has reports of customers with some AMD devices getting into an unbootable state after installing recent Windows operating system security updates. After investigating, Microsoft has determined that some AMD chipsets do not conform to the documentation previously provided to Microsoft to develop the Windows operating system mitigations to protect against the chipset vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown,” the firm said.
This month’s Patch Tuesday rollout begins in just a few hours, so it’ll be interesting to see how fast Microsoft manages to repair these botched updates.