Malwarebytes releases an update Tuesday that briefly disabled thousands of computers

Malwarebytes release an update that disabled thousands of users. Luckily, it was spotted within 8 minutes and removed. If you were affected, they Marcin posted to their blog personally an apology and how to fix it. I have had the pleasure of meeting, talking and even hitting Las Vegas with Marcin and some of his team and you would be hard pressed to find a nicer young man with good intentions.

“It saddens me to report that at around 3 PM PST yesterday, Malwarebytes released a definitions update that disabled thousands of computers worldwide. Within 8 minutes, the update was pulled from our servers. Immediately thereafter, users flocked to our support helpdesk and forums to ask us for a fix.

I want to offer my sincere apology to our millions of customers and free users. I started this company because I thought everyone was entitled to malware-free computing. We acted overzealously in that mission and realize far superior procedures around updating are needed. More was expected of us, and we failed.

So what’s my promise to you? 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.
Here’s what we’ve done to address the issue. We immediately wrote a tool to fix the issue and published instructions on our forums. If you are affected by the issue, please visit the page. If you need assistance or are uncomfortable performing the fix manually, please contact our support team. We have our entire support staff answering tickets feverishly. Tickets are being answered within an hour, and we will reach out to you by phone if e-mail support is not enough.

Please, once again, accept an apology on behalf of our entire company. Let’s get you fixed up and back to a malware-free existence!
Marcin”