Microsoft Windows "Blue Screen Of Death" Outage After Crowdstrike Update Leads To Massive Worldwide IT Outage

Services across banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, supermarkets, and many more businesses worlwide were affected today (19 July) due to a technical problem at the US tech giant Microsoft and American cyber security company Crowdstrike.

Millions of Microsoft Windows users were experiencing the "Blue Screen of Death" error that caused their computers to shut down or restart.

A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike is knocking affected PCs and servers offline, forcing them into a recovery boot loop so machines can’t start properly, the Verge reported.

CrowdStrike is widely used by many businesses worldwide for managing the security of Windows PCs and servers.

In what appears to be a separate outage, Microsoft is also recovering from  from several issues with its Microsoft 365 apps and services.

The root cause of those issues was down to “a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads", the company said.

Several airlines in India reported that their systems across the network were impacted by the outage.

Air India said its "digital systems have been impacted temporarily due to the current Microsoft outage resulting in delays".

"Our systems across the network are impacted by an ongoing issue with Microsoft Azure, which has resulted in increased wait times at our contact centres and airports. You may experience slower check-ins and longer queues," Indigo said in an advisory.

Akasa Air and SpiceJet also reported similar disruptions. 

"Due to infrastructure issues with our service provider, some of our online services, including booking, check-in and manage booking services will be temporarily unavailable," Akasa Air said in a post on X.

"We're currently facing a technical issue in providing updates on flight disruptions. Our team is actively working to resolve this issue. We regret any inconvenience caused and will update you once the issue is resolved. Thank you for your patience and co-operation," SpiceJet posted on X.

Meanwhile, in a statement, India's cybersecurity agency CERT-In said, "It has been reported that Windows hosts related to Crowd strike agent "Falcon Sensor" are facing outages and getting crashed due to recent update received in the product. The concerned windows hosts are experiencing a "Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)" related to Falcon Sensor".

The issues occurred in the latest update of CrowdStrike and the changes have been reverted by the Crowd Strike Team, the CERT-In said.

The agency added that if hosts are still crashing and unable to stay online to receive the Channel File Changes, the following steps can be used as work around for this issue:

• 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.

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