ALERT ALTER ALERT: Urgent communication to customers

Hi,

I would like to alert you about a set of patches that were released on Aug 12^th that can potentially cause Blue Screens (crashes, bug checks) on customers’ Windows machines from Vista all the way up to 8.1. Microsoft is currently investigating these patches and more details will be shared as they become available.

These patches are being Automatically installed on customers’ machine via the Windows Update feature and/or they are being rolled up and packaged via the System Center updates in the Enterprises automatically. We need to immediately alert ALL our customer to make sure that these 4 patches are NOT installed on their machines until further notice.

For more details:

MS14-045: Description of the security update for kernel-mode drivers: August 12, 2014

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2982791

Mitigations

Open the Programs and Features item in Control Panel, and then click View installed updates. Find and then uninstall any of the following updates that are currently installed:

◦KB2982791

◦KB2970228

◦KB2975719

◦KB2975331

If you search the update via article ID only on “Installed Updates” UI, you won’t see the updates listed. You need to search as “KB2982791”.  I have this update and KB2975719 installed on machines..

Based on the queries I’m getting I’ve consolidated these FAQ for all:

When this update was released? August 12

How many incident did we receive? I know about 10 cases on the first 3 days, and we had our first one in MEA today.

Can customers still download these updates? No, PG expired these updates on Aug 15^th

What about customer who downloaded and installed these updates already? Not all machines hit the issue, we advise customers to uninstall these updates as a pre-caution.

What are the symptoms on the affected machine? Blue screen bug check 0x50

What is the solution if the machine crashed from this update? Solution documented on the same article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2982791 under “known issue 3”

Is it ok not to uninstall the update? We recommend to uninstall these update as a pre-caution only, PG are still investigating the behavior.