WindowsPCs across the globe are displaying aBlue Screen of Death(BSOD) error message this morning, impacting businesses such as airlines, banks, hospitals, and more.
The culprit is confirmed to be a broken update from CrowdStrike, acybersecurityprovider that’s widely used across the business world.
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“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website,” says CrowdStrike SEO George Kurtz.
While the fix should prevent additional machines from being impacted by the error screen, it unfortunately doesn’t resolve the issue for PCs that have already been implicated.
IT workers across the world are now in the process of restoring functionality to their fleets of PCs, which are used by small businesses, airlines, banks, hospitals, grocery stores, TV networks, and everything in between.
Microsoft SEO Satya Nadella has since taken to X with a comment of his own, saying “We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.”
A quick look atDowndetectorpaints a not-so-pretty picture, with massive spikes in outage reports beginning in the early hours of the day. The broken infrastructure has led togrounded commercial flights, a loss insome TV broadcasts, and more.
Microsoft 365 is also experiencing troubles, albeit unrelated to CrowdStrike
To add fuel to the fire, Microsoft has also issued an unrelatedService Health Status updateof its own, confirming a ‘service degradation’ across its Microsoft 365 platform. It appears that some users are unable to access various apps and services, including Microsoft OneNote, Defender, and OneDrive for Business.
“We’re continuing to apply mitigation actions to provide relief from the residual impact affecting the remaining impacted Microsoft 365 apps and services. Our telemetry is indicating that the remaining impacted scenarios are progressing towards a full recovery and we’re closely monitoring to ensure this progress continues,” says Microsoft.
Software errors are not uncommon in the business and enterprise worlds, but this is shaping up to be perhaps one of the most significant IT outages in history. The story is continuing to develop, and it’s unclear whether the troubles will all be cleared up before the weekend.
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