Microsoft releases, then pulls, Office 2004 11.3.1 and Office v.X 10.1.9 updates

For a brief period of time yesterday, there were updates for Office v.X as well as Office 2004 available on Microsoft's website as well as via Microsoft AutoUpdate. Both releases contained "several updates to enhance security and stability, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code."

For a while, the patches were still showing up when you ran AutoUpdate, but the Download links on this page and this page produced 404 Not Found errors. The links still go 404, and now the updates aren't showing on AutoUpdate either. Both updates are still listed here, but you'll still end up in the land of 404 if you follow the breadcrumbs.

Has Microsoft pulled the updates intentionally because they found a bug in the updates or updaters themselves (release early, test late?) or has the file server simply "misplaced" them? Should the folks who already updated yesterday from AutoUpdate be worried? Should the folks still waiting for the update be worried? Somehow I doubt that whole icon thing is responsible for knocking the Mac BU this much off their game. So what's up, Mac BU?

If and when Microsoft resumes its update schedule, we'll let you know. Meanwhile, try not to associate with any known malicious hackers.

UPDATED 11:00am ET: Please see "Microsoft Security Response Center says yesterday's Office Updates were a mistake"

View Tags

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx

Categories

Software Odds and ends

For a brief period of time yesterday, there were updates for Office v.X as well as Office 2004 available on Microsoft's website as well as...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

9 Comments

Filter by:

altern8tif

After installing, my MacBook Pro freezes on shutdown/restart... Not too sure if it is the result of the installation. Anyone else experiencing problems with the update from Microsoft??

How do we uninstall the update anyway??

December 13 2006 at 1:51 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jon

How do I go about uninstalling them?

December 13 2006 at 10:14 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Art

How do you "uninstall" pre-release updates, Steve S?!

December 13 2006 at 10:12 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Steve S

Weâ€™ve seen some questions from customers about some security updates that posted for a while today for Office for Mac that they didnâ€™t see any security bulletins for.

I wanted to let you know that these werenâ€™t security updates related to this monthâ€™s release or the two Word issues weâ€™ve written about in Security Advisory 929433 and on our weblog: those investigations are still underway and weâ€™ll release updates for those issues once weâ€™ve met the appropriate quality bar. The updates posted in error were pre-release binaries that had been staged internally as part of our testing for an upcoming release. Due to human error, they were accidentally published to the public websites before our full testing release process was complete.

As soon as we discovered the error, we moved quickly to address it and remove the pre-release binaries from our public sites.

Once our investigation into this issue is complete and we have security updates that meet our quality bar for release, weâ€™ll release those final security updates for all products affected along with a security bulletin. Weâ€™re also taking steps to ensure a mistake like this doesnâ€™t happen again.

We recommend that anyone who may have installed these pre-release updates to uninstall them.

Iâ€™m sorry for any confusion this might have caused.

Thanks.

December 13 2006 at 10:04 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

JJA

Doesn't work for me... should I be worried?

December 13 2006 at 10:00 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Austin

404 here

December 13 2006 at 9:59 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Will

Works for me...

December 13 2006 at 9:44 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Laurie

The actual download links, Matt? You were able to download a dmg? Both links are still 404 here.