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In what's seemingly an unprecedented event, Microsoft is withholding its regularly scheduled Patch Tuesday updates and patches for a month.

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On February 15, the day after Microsoft's regular Patch Tuesday was scheduled, officials said its previously slated February patches would not arrive until Tuesday, March 14.

Microsoft officials said very little yesterday about the reasons the company didn't deliver its Patch Tuesday patches on the second Tuesday of the month, as has been the case for the last several years.

In an update to yesterday's blog post announcing the delay, Microsoft officials also didn't shed any new light on the reasons for the delay.

My sources told me yesterday that Microsoft was having problems with its patch build system, and that those problems resulted in the company's failure to deliver its regular Patch Tuesday patches.

Today's blog post update to yesterday's post noting that Patch Tuesday's patches were not going to happen as scheduled:

"We will deliver updates as part of the planned March Update Tuesday, March 14, 2017.

"Our top priority is to provide the best possible experience for customers in maintaining and protecting their systems. This month, we discovered a last minute issue that could impact some customers and was not resolved in time for our planned updates today.

"After considering all options, we made the decision to delay this month's updates. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this change to the existing plan."

I asked officials tonight for more information about the reasons for the delay and was told the company had no comment beyond what's in the statement above.

Many were expecting Microsoft to provide a remedy for the unpatched Windows SMB bug which has public exploit code in the February bunch of updates.

Microsoft also was slated to commence delivery of IE Security-Only updates separately from its Windows 7/8.1 Cumulative Update patches as of February 2017 Patch Tuesday.

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