New cumulative update, new issues for Windows 10 users

Mar 14, 2018 07:41 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft’s March 2018 Patch Tuesday brought new cumulative updates for Windows 10, including for the Fall Creators Update, also known as version 1709.

KB4088776 was supposed to bring a plethora of security and non-security fixes to these systems, but as it turns out, is also brings a series of problems for a certain number of computers.

Posts on Microsoft’s Community forums are now pointing to the typical issue with cumulative updates: failed installs. KB4088776 fails to install as well, as several users confirmed that it all ends with error 0x80070002 before undoing changes, rebooting the system to the desktop, and then re-offering the update one more time.

Too early to tell how widespread it is

As it happens every month, it’s not exactly clear what’s causing these issues, but one user says that they even tried a clean-install of Windows 10, yet the updates still fail to install.

“I have done a clean install of windows 10 three times now in the past couple of weeks, to no prevail. After each fresh install. the exact same issue. I am running Windows 10 Pro Education, Version 1709, build 16299.15. After each install it seems to update no problem, but seems to only be an issue once I reactivate my Windows 10 Pro Activation key. I gave up weeks ago, and was hoping my problem would simply be solved by the latest update, but that is not the case,” one user explained before others confirmed they have the same issue.

Microsoft is yet to acknowledge the bug and at this point, it’s difficult to estimate how widespread it is since the Patch Tuesday rollout had started only a few hours ago. But the more users receive the cumulative update, the bigger the chances to determine whether this is a botched cumulative update or not, so time will tell if there’s a widespread problem.

For the time being, Microsoft recommends installing cumulative updates as soon as possible, and this makes sense since security improvements are included.