Microsoft Accidentally Deploys Skype During Windows Server Update Service

Customers using Microsoft’s Windows Server Update Services were treated to a Skype update on Thursday, even if they had never installed Skype on their networks systems in the past.

The change added an update to Skype and for systems that had never installed the program it was automatically added, forcing system administrators to manually remove the Skype software from computers that had installed the update.

Typically system administrators use WSUS to manage many machines over a large network since performing updates manually would be difficult to manage. Typically administrators choose which updates to push out to their network, however admins who allowed machines to receive updates without explicit permission found Skype to be installed as a non-security update early on Wednesday morning.

To fix the issue Microsoft has expired the update which means it will not deploy on any further WSUS servers. In the meantime many administrators have begun complaining about the issue on Microsoft’s support forums.

One user on the support forum suggested the following fix:

psexec \computername -h -s MsiExec.exe /X{EE7257A2-39A2-4D2F-9DAC-F9F25B8AE1D8} /qn

This worked for me at least, just got all the computers in a text file and ran:

psexec @C:pclist.txt -h -s MsiExec.exe /X{EE7257A2-39A2-4D2F-9DAC-F9F25B8AE1D8} /qn

WSUS showed 50% deployment so some of them failed but the ones that exit with Code 0 seemed to be OK.
And of course decline the update on WSUS and remove the Skype product until they get this resolved.

Make sure nobody is using Skype with permissions or you will have to re-install the application after running the removal query.