Apple pulls buggy macOS Mojave Security Update, Safari 14

Apple appears to have pulled the latest macOS Mojave Security Update, as well as the Safari 14 download for macOS Mojave, after users ran into a slew of problems.

According to Mr. Macintosh, some of the issues that users experienced include problems with memory, slow boot and high fan speeds, system sluggishness, and stalls in Finder, among other problems. Apple pulled both updates at around 5 p.m. Eastern on Sept. 30.

Complaints about the update started to surface shortly after it was released on Sept. 24, though the Safari 14 update for Mojave was released on Sept. 16. The exact update for macOS Mojave was Security Update 2020-005, and it addressed a number of security vulnerabilities in Mail, ImageIO, and the Sandbox.

Users who are still running the updates on macOS Mojave machines should expect some type of patch or fix soon. Reports suggest that reinstalling the operating system, reverting to a prior Time Machine backup, or updating to macOS Catalina could also mitigate the issues.

No problems were reported for the Sept. 24 macOS Catalina Security Update or the Safari 14 update for that operating system.

13 Comments

wolke7 3 comments · 9 Years

About 4 years ago

AppleInsider said:
No problems were reported for the Sept. 24 macOS Catalina Security Update or the Safari 14 update for that operating system.

Not true for me. Immediately after the Security Update my MacBook Pro 2012 got into a state with high fan speeds and system sluggishness.
The accountsd process was going crazy, eating up all my cpu! Killing the process or rebooting several times did not help. finally I could fix it by resetting the system keychain....

SpamSandwich 32917 comments · 19 Years

Ugh. Software development while all the teams are working independently must be a total nightmare for the usually collaborative Apple programmers.

surgefilter 26 comments · 15 Years

Safari 14 has been a disaster in the past fortnight as far as the long-promised support by Apple of Google’s amazing .WEBP lossless image format that is finally making inroads against JPEG and PNG... with huge bandwidth savings on file sizes and being pushed heavily by Google for all websites trying to optimize for Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals performance analytics.

Works fine for standard pictures and backgrounds but if the .webp pic has an alpha channel transparency on a Z layer, the Safari v14 browser just doesn’t have a clue, whilst Chrome, Firefox and the others merrily display whatever you throw at them. In general it’s loading websites far slower since v14 than its competitors.

Thankfully I didn’t update my MacPro’s Mojave yet to have the other problems with the OS itself.

cornchip 1943 comments · 11 Years

surgefilter said:

Safari 14 has been a disaster in the past fortnight as far as the long-promised support by Apple of Google’s amazing .WEBP lossless image format that is finally making inroads against JPEG and PNG... with huge bandwidth savings on file sizes and being pushed heavily by Google for all websites trying to optimize for Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals performance analytics.

Works fine for standard pictures and backgrounds but if the .webp pic has an alpha channel transparency on a Z layer, the Safari v14 browser just doesn’t have a clue, whilst Chrome, Firefox and the others merrily display whatever you throw at them. In general it’s loading websites far slower since v14 than its competitors.

Thankfully I didn’t update my MacPro’s Mojave yet to have the other problems with the OS itself.

I don’t trust google with a universal image format, but that’s just me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've had a gloriously smooth iOS 14 experience so far. The infuriating phone and text bugs which were persistent on my SE Classic from the Jan or Feb update of iOS 13 seem to have been eliminated. And I’m loving all the new features and details, especially the security ones.

However, I’m right there with you as far as updating the MacPro; thank God I’ve been procrastinating on that!

MrMacintoshBlog 1 comment · 4 Years

Thanks for the link Mike!

Speaking of problematic updates, the 10.15.7 update has caused a few problems. I wrote about one that is causing problems for some iCloud users. For me, this issue is starting to drive more traffic than the 2020-005 Security update problem article!

https://mrmacintosh.com/catalina-10-15-7-update-accountsd-using-400-if-using-icloud-mail/