Trend Micro Inc. will compensate customers in Japan for the cost of repairing PCs after it delivered a faulty antivirus update to them over the weekend, the company said Thursday. The company will not offer reparation for any loss of business incurred and the fate of overseas customers remains unclear.
A fault in the update file, released Saturday morning local time, sucked up processing power and severely degraded PC performance for thousands of users worldwide who received the update. It affected PC’s running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) with either Trend Micro’s OfficeScan or VirusBuster software.
Trend Micro, based in Tokyo, admitted earlier this week that it had not checked some code in the update prior to its release or tested it fully on PCs running SP2. By mid-Tuesday, the company had fielded over 370,000 calls about the issue from customers, and admitted that more than 650 companies had been affected.
All of the company’s 3.5 million consumer customers in Japan who purchased VirusBuster will get an additional month of support for free, said Naomi Ikenomoto, a company spokeswoman. Corporate customers who bought one of Trend Micro’s enterprise products will also get an extra month’s support, she said.
In addition, consumers who called out engineers to repair their PCs and who have receipts for that work will be able to claim costs up to a maximum of