Windows 10 May 2019 Update may be coming as soon as this week

Windows 10
Image credit: Microsoft

We were expecting the May 2019 Update to kick-off at some point in late May, and it appears that it could launch this week, rather than next, if some relatively unusual activity in the preview builds of Windows 10 is anything to go by.

This is based on the fact that yesterday, Microsoft released a new build (18362.116) for testers in the slow and release preview rings, which included a fix for an installation failure bug, and an Edge and Internet Explorer-related issue that barred access to some gov.uk sites.

What’s interesting here is that as Neowin observes, Microsoft pushed this update out on a Sunday, which is unusual when it comes to test builds – nothing normally happens at the weekend.

On schedule?

So could this point to Microsoft wanting to get these fixes out to testers quickly, because the plan is to launch the May 2019 Update later this week? That’s certainly a possibility we can’t discount, particularly as we haven’t heard anything about show-stopping bugs (which might throw a spanner in the works for the upgrade) in some time.

The last major glitch was a bug which caused potentially nasty ramifications for those who have external USB devices (or SD cards) plugged into their PC, but that was back in April.

Fingers crossed that everything is going smoothly, then, and we might see the May 2019 Update very soon indeed.

However, we must also bear in mind that Microsoft is taking extra care to ensure it avoids another disastrous rollout, as was the case with the previous October 2018 Update (which still hadn’t arrived on 30% of all PCs as of the beginning of May, according to one set of stats).

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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