The update was originally published in July this year

Aug 27, 2018 05:31 GMT  ·  By

It’s no longer a surprise that some of the updates released by Microsoft are causing more harm than good, and by the looks of things, a recent Spectre patch makes no exception.

KB4100347 is a Windows 10 April 2018 Update patch released by Microsoft in July this year in order to provide more mitigations against the Spectre Variant 2 vulnerability, but according to reports, some PCs are no longer able to boot after installing it.

Despite originally being pushed to systems two months ago, the update was reportedly re-released last week to a number of devices – note that the KB page of the update hasn’t been updated since July, therefore we can’t tell for sure if this new version includes any changes or not.

But as per BornCity, it looks like this “new version” of KB4100347 prevents some systems from booting after installing the update, and up to this point, no workaround has been found except for the typical removing the update trick.

Update bricking systems

While Microsoft has remained completely tight-lipped on any potential causes of these issues, the Windows community, including users whose systems have been rendered useless after installing the update, believes it’s all because their PCs are mistakenly being offered the patch.

KB4100347 should be specifically shipped to Intel systems but some machines with AMD processors are getting them too, it seems, which obviously leads to the operating system no longer being able to boot.

At this point, it’s hard to determine how many PCs have been hit by the issues described above, and with Microsoft not saying anything about any potential problems, it’s pretty hard to tell whether the update is being offered to the wrong computers or not. What would be more interesting to find out is what’s new in this updated version of KB4100347 and why some systems are being re-offered the patch one month after its original release.

We’ve contacted Microsoft looking for answers to these questions and we’ll update the article when and if more details are offered.