← Glossary Term
Patch Tuesday
Microsoft's monthly security update, released on the second Tuesday of each month.
Since 2003 Microsoft has bundled its security fixes into one predictable monthly release on the second Tuesday, so that administrators can plan a maintenance window instead of reacting to patches all month. Other vendors now time their releases to match.
The size of a given Patch Tuesday says more about how hard people are looking than about how broken the software is. September 2026 set a record with 973 fixes, a jump Microsoft partly attributes to AI systems scanning its own codebase. The fixes worth acting on first are always the zero-days, meaning holes already being exploited before a patch existed.
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