DO NOT INSTALL 9.703-2!!!

Question

DO NOT INSTALL 9.703-2!!! 
 My lab system was Up2Dated to 9.703-2 Thursday evening at 10PM CDT (UTC -0500) and all connection with the outside world immediately stopped. My local connection would work normally a few minutes at a time and then everything would lock up for a few minutes. I could not identify the problem with top, but did see a lot of zombie confd processes. I lost the entire day of Friday because my wife has a big project due next week and was working via Microsoft Teams all day with her colleagues. 
 I will suggest to Sophos that the file be removed from the ftp site. Grumble. 
 Cheers - Bob

FloSupport · Accepted Answer

Hi All, 
 A new v9.703 update is currently being tested, and is targeted for release during the week of Apr 20. Both customers running on v9.702 and the previous version of v9.703 will be able to upgrade to this new version. 
 The Advisory KBA has been updated to provide more information regarding this incident: 
 
 Advisory: Sophos UTM - Traffic not passing after upgrading to v9.703

Regards,

FloSupport · Answer

Hi All, 
 UTM v9.7 MR3 was re-released on, 23 April 2020. 
 More info available in the UTM release notes post . 
 Regards,

bobbylam · Answer

First of all, I would like to sincerely apologize to anyone who was affected by this issue. There was a gap in our testing for this 9.703 release, and the problem should've never made it into the field. Additionally we should've reacted more quickly when some of you reported this issue on the forums. 
 As you can see from the KBA that was posted, we have done a detailed analysis on what went wrong (not just the bug, but how we reacted & our testing process), and have/will put improvements/additional safeguards in place to ensure something like this doesn't happen again. We will learn from this, and continue to improve. 
 As for whether this is another RED50 issue: Fundamentally this issue and the RED50 problem are very different. The RED50 issue was related to the hardware (specifically how the driver reacts when the underlying flash storage degrades - which is normal for flash drives), and it took us a long time to reproduce the problem even after getting failed units shipped back to Engineering for analysis (it is indeterministic when flash drives will degrade). Once we were able to reproduce/see the problem, we moved quickly to address it (the delay wasn't due to a lack of focus/trying). This 9.703 issue does not have any hardware component, and we were able to reproduce, isolate & understand the problem quickly, so we can confidently say the new 9.703 update that was re-released today has the problem addressed. 
 Again I would like to apologize to all who were affected by this issue. We should be better, and we will be. I also would like to thank BAlfson for reporting this issue first, and working with us on the solution.