I wasn't sure if there is a project page for the update.drupal.org site to post this. Was the xml output on that site recently changed? For example with this xml file: http://updates.drupal.org/release-history/lightbox2/5.x The update-status module's xml parser class (I'm using drupal 5.7) removes all information between the </terms> tag and the <releases> tag. That breaks drush because it needs the "default_major" data. Here's an issue with more information: http://drupal.org/node/269444