As you may be aware Microsoft-based computers, including those managed by The PC Whisperer, Inc,. experienced a major issue this weekend starting Saturday January 27th, 2018.
We’ve determined that it’s related to a Windows update pushed out by Microsoft to address the critical security issue associated with AMD, ARM, and Intel processors. The update was an attempt to patch and secure the risk identified earlier this month. Even though many of our clients’ systems were set to NOT UPDATE WINDOWS, the update was pushed through by Microsoft regardless.
Many clients with Windows 7, 8, and 10 operating systems experienced one or more of the following issues and up to 5 hours of down time.
- Users were asked to log into their accounts indicating their computer had restarted. Subsequently all open programs had been closed which may have caused some data loss.
- Computers displayed for a varying amount of time the notice that Windows was updating.
- During the update, some computers showed a blank black screen with a single white cursor blinking at the top left. Others experienced a “Blue Screen of Death,” and when they turned off their system overnight they were able to start up their units with no problem. Rebooting did not help and in fact prolonged the issue because it restarted the update. In both instances however, they eventually finished.
- Once the user’s desktop profile was loaded in the system, some programs seemed to be “sluggish” and there were Internet connectivity problems. In these cases, it appears that the update was not quite completed.
There wasn’t anything we could have done to manage or prevent this downtime due to the fact that even though we had disabled Windows Update Service, the patch was applied with force, overriding our update-related settings.
We initially had no information being reported on this but found this article: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42872301
