I was wondering the same thing, fortunately the answer was readily available. And I suppose, we've just been spared from another half-baked update that starts new headaches
I wonder, is this really the first time ever MS missed a patch Tuesday date? As far as I remember, they never missed one during my old XP days, but it's a long time ago and I could be wrong.
I only experienced once before that it was on another time (9 AM redmond instead of 10 AM), not ever that they skipped it on patchtuesday.
That's sort of things that will happen when you fired all your internal testers. And now it's finally happened. And i don't even mention all these broken updates that were pushed anyway.
They skipped patch Tuesday this time because MS knew I was testing some manual update methods that require a new update that requires a reboot.
Microsoft has been issuing lots of Out-of-band updates lately. The choice to stop the official 'Patch Tuesday' probably relates to this, and the fact that the insider program allows them to do rolling releases multiple times a month. This in turn allows them to test fixes on several different platforms very quickly, and in turn, release updates at odd times. It's a good thing and a bad thing. There's no guarantee that the rolling updates are safe - just that they're a guaranteed release at some point during a month's patch cycle.