Gina,
You misunderstood me. I was not suggesting that the forum was being tight lipped about the problem.
On the contrary, the forum has responded extremely well to the specific problem and I think it is marvellous that Tom came to us to announce the fix within two days of the first problems being encountered.
In fact, this is the forum for this sort of issue. Microsoft Access is not supported by the Microsoft 365 Support team. They do not have the expertise or resources to deal with Access issues that can't be solved by its online help system. If you raise a support ticket for Access through your Microsoft 365 subscription, once they have gone through the reboot and upgrade routines, they will refer you here. In fact, they cannot even escalate support issues to the Access dev team - they do not have the lines of communication in place to do so.
This forum is monitored by excellent MVPs who have a direct line to the Access dev team. So once it has been determined that there is a real problem with Access itself, they act as a conduit to get something done about it, quickly and effectively. They also keep us up to date with progress as the fix is developed and rolled out.
This is exactly what Tom has done in this case and his actions are beyond criticism.
What I am referring to as "the big secret" is the mechanism that Microsoft are using to interact in near real-time with our computers to control the behaviour of Microsoft Office without our knowledge or involvement. I was not aware of this mechanism and can find very little information which describes or explains it.
I assume that their paranoia about coming clean and openly discussing the mechanism is because this sounds so sinister. Is it a fiendish violation of our privacy that they need to keep secret? Perhaps if it had been a surreptitious secondary use of the activation/licencing mechanism it would be. But phoning home to check the status/quality of previously installed updates is a perfectly legitimate, sensible and welcome extension of the Office Update mechanism. Assuming that it is controlled by the option to opt-in to automatic updates and that the connections are not being tracked for other purposes, there are no privacy issues to be shy about.
The consequences of "bad patches" are widespread and severe. This FeatureGate function is a welcome tool which helps to mitigate the consequences when they inevitably occur. I am calling for more openness and information about this aspect of the Office Update mechanism. This will allow us to make more effective decisions when dealing with these issues and allow us to contribute to help Microsoft to solve the issues more efficiently.
