Explained: What caused dreaded 'Blue Screen of Death' on Windows and how affected users can resolve issue?
A major outage hit several IT systems across the world, including India and other countries like Australia, Germany and other countries on Friday, affecting many critical services. The outage is possibly due to the failure of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity platform that provides cybersecurity solutions for Microsoft Windows.
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FollowMillions of Windows computers throughout the world have experienced an abrupt shutdown or restart due to a serious technical problem. Microsoft Inc. said the error is due to a recent CrowdStrike update. The initial root cause is "a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads (that has) caused interruption between storage and compute resources, and which (has) resulted in connectivity failures," according to Microsoft's Service Health Status updates. The business said that "downstream (and dependent) Microsoft 365 services" have been impacted by these issues.
CrowdStrike Engineering - a cybersecurity services firm that works with Microsoft - has identified a content deployment related to this issue and reverted those changes. The company has posted steps for resolution for affected Windows users.
What did Microsoft say?
In a detailed thread on X, the software services giant said it is "investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services".
"We're working on rerouting impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion," Microsoft said, adding, "We're still observing a positive trend in service availability while we continue to redirect impacted traffic."
Workaround
- Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment.
- Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory.
- Locate the file matching C-00000291*.sys and delete it.
- Boot the host normally.
Various services take a hit
Services, including critical providers like police and government, across the world have been affected. In India, SpiceJet has said it is experiencing "technical challenges" that have affected online ticket booking and check-in, as well as other functionalities. New airline Akasa Air and industry veterans IndiGo have put out similar messages.
There are reports of flights being grounded in Australia and the United States. The tech problem has affected banks and financial services also, with reports the London Stock Exchange has been impacted.
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