Windows emergency Meltdown patch: Microsoft stops update for AMD PCs after crash reports

Microsoft has recently released a patch to mitigate Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaw. Microsoft has scaled back its rollout of Windows patches against the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws after reports the updates were crashing computers with AMD processors.

“To prevent AMD customers from getting into an unbootable state, Microsoft will temporarily pause sending the following Windows operating system updates to devices with impacted AMD processors at this time,” Microsoft said in a statement on its support site.

After the Windows updates were installed on PCs running on AMD Athlon X2 processors, there were reports these machines would not boot and would then get stuck in an endless loop while they tried to roll back to an earlier build of Windows.

The issue was particularly tricky for those running Windows 10 Home, due to the OS not providing a simple way for users to defer updates.

Microsoft is halting the rollout of nine updates to affected AMD PCs, outlined in detail here, but said it is working with AMD to restore the updates to affected devices “as soon as possible”.

Spectre and Meltdown are design flaws in modern processors that expose a wide range of PCs, phones, tablets and servers to attack.

While there is little evidence of the flaws being exploited to date, the two vulnerabilities in modern chip design could allow attackers to bypass system protections to read sensitive information, such as passwords, from memory.

The recent Microsoft patches apply to all supported versions of Windows and Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server and the Edge and Internet Explorer 11 browsers.

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