Microsoft's 'atypical' emergency Windows patches are becoming awfully typical

Opinion Microsoft has had a bad start to the year. Two out-of-band updates in the weeks after the first Patch Tuesday of 2026 rattled administrators' already shaky faith in the company. But are things getting worse?

According to Register readers, and the company's own release health dashboard, the answer has to be yes. It isn't just you. The frequency of emergency out-of-band releases for the company's operating systems has been rapidly increasing to the point where, for every Patch Tuesday update, there'll likely be at least one out-of-band patch to fix whatever got broken.

To be fair to Microsoft, it is also more than capable of emitting out-of-band releases when it finds things have been broken that were not part of the Patch Tuesday cadence.

Microsoft states that out-of-band releases "are used in atypical cases, such as security vulnerabilities or a quality issue, when devices should ...