Symantec Confirms Antivirus Update Was Behind Internet Explorer Crashes

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

AV vendor inadvertently crippled millions of Internet Explorer installations

On Friday, a thread came up on the Norton Community forum from a user complaining of a Norton Internet Security (NIS) antivirus update breaking Internet Explorer on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. It soon swelled to multiple pages as droves of other users running Internet Explorer 9 and up on Windows Vista and up confirmed as much. Needless to say they were all very angry with an antivirus update, of all things, rendering a key software completely unusable (see what we did there?), and in some cases, forcing them to uninstall NIS.
To Symantec’s credit, it did not take the company too long to identify the culprit and roll out a fix. Into the eighth page of the thread and around five hours after the original post, reports of the issue having been fixed by a fresh update started coming in.
Here’s what Symantec had to say: “Based on our analysis, the issue was caused by a corrupt file in the virus definition set. Symantec recreated a snapshot of the same definition package as 20150221.001 and released it through our LiveUpdate servers.”
According to the company, only 32-bit versions of the world’s second most-used browser were affected by the faulty update.
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