A customer of mine recently started deploying Windows 8 in their environment.
MDT was set up and the deployment was working fine, but after deployment the Windows 8 machines wouldn’t connect to the WSUS server.
When trying to connect to the WSUS-server through the Control Panel I got an error message.
Windows could not search for new updates. Code 80096002 Windows Update ran into a problem.
The site which I had deployed this machine at had its own WSUS-server (Windows 2008 R2) which was an offsite replica of their main WSUS-server (based on Windows 2012 R2). Machines that connected to the main server did not run into this problem.
I found a which resolves this issue on Windows 2008 R2. After applying it the offsite server started working.
You can find the patch and more information at KB2734608.