Today, thousands of Windows computers are experiencing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) problem on startup, affecting banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, supermarkets and many other businesses around the world. A faulty update from cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike took affected PCs and servers offline, forcing them into a recovery boot loop that prevented the machines from booting properly. CrowdStrike is used by many enterprises around the world to manage the security of Windows PCs and servers.
Australia’s banks, airlines and television broadcasters were the first to sound the alarm, and thousands of machines began to go offline. As European businesses open for business, these problems are spreading. BBC Sky News was unable to broadcast its morning news bulletin for several hours this morning, displaying a message apologizing for a “broadcast blackout”. Ryanair, one of Europe’s largest airlines, also said it was facing a “third-party” IT issue that was affecting flight departures.
The Federal Aviation Administration said all Delta, United and American flights were grounded due to “communications issues.” Berlin Airport also warned that flights could be delayed due to “technical problems”. Many of Alaska’s 911 emergency call centers are also affected by these issues. One airline in India even switched to handwritten boarding passes due to the shutdown.
“We have received widespread reports of BSODs on Windows hosts, occurring on multiple sensor versions,” CrowdStrike said in a support note posted at 1:20 a.m. ET today. CrowdStrike has discovered the issue and has The erroneous update was restored, but this does not appear to help computers that were already affected.
In a Reddit post, hundreds of IT administrators reported the widespread problem, with workaround steps including booting affected Windows computers into safe mode, navigating to the CrowdStrike directory and deleting system files. This can be troublesome for some cloud-based servers or even Windows laptops deployed and used remotely.
One Reddit poster said “our entire company is offline,” while another said 70% of their laptops were malfunctioning and stuck in boot loops. “Happy Friday,” read one poster on Reddit. It looks like it’s going to be a long day for IT administrators around the world.
In what appears to be a separate outage, Microsoft is also recovering from multiple issues with its Microsoft 365 apps and services. The root cause of these issues is “a configuration change as part of our Azure backend workload.”
