After 14 months of security updates, Microsoft finally gives techies—and consumers—‘Patch Tuesday’ off. But ‘no fixes’ doesn’t mean ‘no problems.’

Microsoft has announced that it does not expect to release security patches on Tuesday. The news comes as a welcome surprise for IT staffers and consumers alike, who have had to install Microsoft patches each month since January 2004. The grand total: 49 fixes. The company makes its digital band-aids available on the second Tuesday of each month. Last month, Windows users faced the specter of downloading and installing 12 hefty fixes, including critical fixes for its Internet Explorer web browser. This can cost millions of dollars for large companies like Citibank, which have hundreds of thousands of computers to secure. But “no patches” doesn’t mean “no problems.” “It could be that they do have some vulnerabilities that they’re working on and choosing not to release them at this point,” said Firas Raouf, COO of eEye Digital Security, a vulnerability research and intrusion-protection startup. “They don’t have anything outstanding from us, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have other vulnerabilities from other researchers.”