The mystery of the disappearing Windows 7 patch has been solved.
On Wednesday, a number of Microsoft users took to the company’s support forums to ask about a mysterious update, KB3877432, which identified itself as a language pack for Windows 7. Users became concerned when the patch subsequently disappeared.
As it turns out, the update was released in error, Microsoft confirmed. ”We incorrectly published a test update and are in the process of removing it,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said in an email.
One user, “yidkidone,” snapped a screenshot of the “patch” that arrived on his desktop.
Yidkidone A screenshot of the erroneous Windows update.
To her credit, Susan Bradley, a Microsoft Most Valuable Partner and a volunteer moderator on the support site, was on top of the situation from the beginning. “It’s not the first time someone [or probably these days some computer] in charge of the approve button approved something it wasn’t supposed to approve,” she wrote, referring to the mistake as an “oopsie” from someone at Microsoft.
So if you do receive it, what then? “You should be able to decline it from the server,” Bradley wrote. “When they’ve oopsied before they have expired the offending update off the servers. The next time you sync it will expire off automatically.”
Why this matters: As it turns out, the “patch” was totally harmless, although it certainly caused some angst among the small group of users that posted to the support thread, who wondered if the Windows Update service was itself compromised. Fortunately, it wasn’t.
This story was reported earlier by ZDNet.