Malwarebytes Update Kills Thousands Of Computers

An update from Windows malware removers Malwarebytes has caused thousands of computers across the world to crash, causing plenty of headaches for IT managers.

Problems emerged on Monday, late in the evening UK time, and even though the update was quickly pulled, Malwarebytes forums were flooded with complaints.

Malwarebytes says sorry

The company has been remarkably contrite, promising to do better in the future

“I want to offer my sincere apology to our millions of customers and free users,” company founder Marcin Kleczynski wrote in a blog post.

“I started this company because I thought everyone was entitled to malware-free computing. We acted overzealously in that mission and realise far superior procedures around updating are needed. More was expected of us, and we failed.

“Working day and night, we are commissioning several new resources to stop this from happening again. We are building more redundancy to check our researchers’ work and improving our peer review.”

The company has pushed out a tool to fix the issue, which the blog links to. Alternatively, users can go through the Malwarebytes support team.

Kleczynski said customers should be answered within an hour.

The gaffe comes just a matter of days after Microsoft shoved out an update that caused systems to crash and Kaspersky anti-virus to stop working.

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