It’s called Patch Tuesday, and it’s the day Microsoft releases updates for its products. Depending on the size of your device fleet and the bandwidth available, you might notice some network slowness on these days - especially if there’s no structured update management policy in place.
On this day, Microsoft rolls out critical patches (including zero-days), security updates, cumulative updates, bug fixes, and performance/stability improvements.
In enterprise environments, don’t forget to manage updates carefully: test them on staging machines first, and only then roll them out to the rest of the organization. In fact, I recommend using a three-ring approach:
Ring 0 – First machines and users to receive updates;
Ring 1 – Key machines/users representing different departments;
Ring 2 – The rest of the organization.
This can be managed using solutions like Intune, WSUS, SCCM, or other remote management platforms (RMMs).
That said, patches that fix zero-days - vulnerabilities for which no official fix existed and that may already be exploited - should be applied as early as possible, regardless of which ring the device belongs to.
Also, keep in mind: if the second Tuesday of the month is a public holiday, it’s likely that many computers were off and didn’t receive the update - meaning the real slowdown will happen on Wednesday. Just saying… it has happened before. :)
Talk soon,
Nelson