Before getting into what and why, let’s briefly look at both these situations. Firstly, while Microsoft does usually detail changes in Office patches, the changelog don’t always get published on Patch Tuesday. Sometimes the company sends out the details a day or two later. Yes, it’s a clumsy model, but explains why release notes did not accompany the 20 Office patches yesterday. However, there is still some confusion because Microsoft did send a link for the Office patches on the MSDN Developer blog. For some reason, this link ends in a dead end “404 page disabled”. My best guess is Microsoft published but pulled the list of changes. We will keep an eye out over the next day or two to see if the changes are published and update here accordingly. If you want to see a list created by PKCano, you can do so here.
New or Old?
Perhaps the company removed the list because it knows it screwed up with the patches, many of which were already sent out in March. Microsoft lists some of the patches as “April 2, 2019 update for Office 2016” but clicking on their information shows they were released on March 19. Basically, users are now left confused over which patches they have, and which are for this month. Have existing patches been sent out again on accident, or has Microsoft mislabeled April’s releases? We expect someone at Microsoft has made a mistake and the company will be clearing up the confusion at some point.
