Microsoft scraps September security update

Microsoft has decided not to go ahead with its monthly security update after encountering an unspecified quality issue with the software patch it had planned to release next Tuesday.

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This Thursday, Microsoft said it would be offering a patch to a critical flaw in its Windows operating system next week. The next day, however, company representatives said that the company had changed its mind and would not be releasing any security patches this month after all.

Microsoft releases most software patches on the second Tuesday of each month, a date that has come to be known as "Patch Tuesday" by security professionals.

The software vendor declined to say exactly what had caused the last-minute change in plans.

"It was a quality issue," said a Microsoft spokeswoman. "They found something that made them realize that it was best not to release (the patch) this month," she said, adding that the company's security team decided it needed to put the Windows patch through additional testing.

This is the second time that Microsoft has changed its mind about releasing a patch since the company began giving customers advanced notification of its monthly patches late last year, the spokeswoman said.

It is also the second month in a row that quality issues have marred the monthly software release. In August, Microsoft released a corrupted version of a patch for Internet Explorer, and users who picked up the patch from Microsoft's Download Center within the first few hours of its release were unable to install the software patch.

This month's delay is not related to the corruption problem that occurred last month, the spokeswoman said.

Though it won't be releasing security updates next Tuesday, there will still be some new software for Windows users. Microsoft still plans to update its Malicious Software Removal Tool, and the company will also release an unspecified high priority, "non-security" update, the spokeswoman said.

Microsoft's statement on the updates can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/advance.mspx