For Windows enthusiasts, Patch Tuesday being canceled is reminiscent of when Santa almost had to cancel Christmas before he discovered Rudolph"s glowing nose, but Patch Tuesday was indeed canceled this month. What ended up happening is that the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities were exposed early, causing Microsoft to prematurely released a round of cumulative updates on January 3. These updates weren"t flawless though, as some users with PCs that have AMD processors found their devices in an unbootable state.
Microsoft ended up pulling the updates, promising a fix at a later time. Patch Tuesday (the second Tuesday of the month) came and went, but earlier today, the company released major cumulative updates for PCs running Windows 10 versions 1607 and 1703.
As it turns out though, there"s another update, which is for version 1709 (the Fall Creators Update) and isn"t listed in the Windows 10 Update History. It"s KB4073290, and it brings the build number to 16299.194. You can manually download it here.
The release notes only list one fix:
An update is available to fix the following issue that occurs after you install January 3, 2018—KB4056892 (OS Build 16299.192):
AMD devices fall into an unbootable state.
Naturally, cumulative updates are, well, cumulative, meaning that they include all of the fixes from the other updates that came before it. Being that build 16299.192 (KB4056892) was pulled, you"re getting those fixes as well, which of course, includes mitigations for the vulnerabilities discovered earlier this month.
We didn"t have any AMD machines to test it out on, but none of our Intel machines received this as an update, even those that never installed 16299.192. Because of this, it seems likely that only PCs with an AMD CPU will receive this update through Windows Update.