Microsoft pulls faulty Office updates

Microsoft's software has been hit by another brace of flaws, with the company pulling two updates released earlier this month and admitting to an issue with a third causing application crashes - embarrassingly in its first-party Access and Outlook software.

Microsoft has not been having a smooth time of late: The company's woes began in earnest after the release of the Windows 10 October Update early last month, which was quickly pulled after it was found to be deleting users' files - an issue reported to the company via its Windows Insider beta programme a full three months before general release. This, and other less serious issues, caused the update to be delayed to this month - only for further bugs in network drive mapping and support for selected hardware devices to be uncovered.

Now, the company's bugfix-focused Patch Tuesday releases have come under the microscope following reports that they are responsible for crashes in Microsoft's own Access and Outlook software packages. In a pair of updates first spotted by Softpedia, Microsoft has pulled both the KB2863821 and KB4461522 updates for Office 2010 following the discovery that they are responsible for crashes in the Access database tool and 'other applications'.

A third update, the Outlook 2010 November 13 2018 Security Update, remains available but has resulted in Outlook 2010 crashing on start-up when installed on 64-bit systems. Given that this update fixes an actively-exploited security vulnerability, Microsoft has kept the update available but claims to be 'researching the problem'.

As if these weren't enough, Microsoft has also been hit by an flaw in its multi-factor authentication (MFA) system which has prevented users from logging in to affected systems including Office 365. The flaw, the company reported, was the result of the company's European cache servers hitting their peak usage and failing to fail-over to North American servers, resulting in throttling.

Microsoft has not yet issued a public comment on the removal of the updates nor the failure of its MFA servers, bar what is available in the knowledge base release notes and the Office 365 status page.