Thousands of Windows machines are experiencing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issue on startup today, affecting banks, airlines, TV stations, supermarkets, and many other businesses around the world. A faulty update from cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike is taking affected PCs and servers offline, forcing them to boot into a recovery loop, preventing the machines from booting properly. CrowdStrike is widely used by many businesses around the world to manage the security of Windows PCs and servers.
Australian banks, airlines and television stations were the first to sound the alarm when thousands of machines began to fail. The problems are now spreading as companies based in Europe begin to work. Britain’s Sky News has been unable to broadcast his morning news bulletins for hours this morning, and was display a message apologizing for “the interruption of this broadcast.” Ryanair, one of Europe’s largest airlines, also says he feels a “third party” computer problem that impacts flight departures.
The United States Federal Aviation Administration said all flights Delta, United and American Airlines planes are grounded due to a “communication problem.” Berlin airport is also warning travel delays due to “technical issues.” Many 911 emergency call centers in Alaska have also been affected by these problems. One airline in India has even turned to handwritten boarding passes due to breakdowns.
“We have numerous reports of BSODs on Windows hosts, occurring on multiple versions of sensors,” CrowdStrike says in a support note posted at 1:20am ET today. CrowdStrike has identified the issue and rolled back the faulty update, but that doesn’t appear to help machines that were already impacted.
In a Reddit threadHundreds of IT administrators are reporting widespread issues, and workarounds include booting affected Windows machines into Safe Mode, navigating to the CrowdStrike directory, and deleting a system file. This can be problematic on some cloud-based servers, or even on Windows laptops that are deployed and used remotely.
“Our entire company is offline,” says one Redditor, while another claims that 70% of their laptops are down and stuck in a boot loop. “Happy Friday,” says one Redditor. It looks like it’s going to be a long day for IT admins everywhere.
In what appears to be a separate outage, Microsoft is also recovering of several issues with its Microsoft 365 applications and services. The root cause of these issues was due to “a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads.”
