Microsoft Windows BSOD strikes again: ‘Largest IT outage in history’ takes down airlines, hospitals, and more

Microsoft’s Windows BSOD has struck again – worldwide. IT security consultant Troy Hunt called it “the largest IT outage in history,” saying, “basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time.”
George Kurtz, president and CEO of Crowdstrike, a modern antivirus platform, was quick to take responsibility for the issue, writing on X, “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
https://x.com/George_Kurtz/status/1814235001745027317
Kevin Purdy for Ars Technica:
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Millions of people outside the IT industry are learning what CrowdStrike is today, and that’s a real bad thing. Meanwhile, Microsoft is also catching blame for global network outages, and between the two, it’s unclear as of Friday morning just who caused what.
After cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike shipped an update to its Falcon Sensor software that protects mission critical systems, Blue Screens of Death (BSODs) started taking down Windows-based systems. The problems started in Australia and followed the dateline from there. TV networks, 911 call centers, and even the Paris Olympics were affected. Banks and financial systems in India, South Africa, Thailand, and other countries fell as computers suddenly crashed. Some individual workers discovered that their work-issued laptops were booting to blue screens on Friday morning.
A CrowdStrike engineer posted in the official CrowdStrike subreddit that the workaround steps involve booting affected Windows systems into Safe Mode or the Recovery Environment, navigating to a CrowdStrike directory, and deleting a.sys file and rebooting. If this works, it’s not something that can be done through a network push, so a lot of manual work remains to be done.

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