A major Windows BSOD issue is affecting banks, airlines, and TV stations.
A faulty update from CrowdStrike has caused a global outage. Thousands of Windows computers are experiencing a blue screen of death (BSOD) when booting up today, affecting banks, airlines, TV stations, supermarkets, and many other businesses around the world.
A faulty update from CrowdStrike is causing affected computers and servers to shut down and fail to boot properly. This problem is not caused by Microsoft, but by CrowdStrike software used by many companies around the world to secure Windows computers and servers.
Australian banks, airlines, and television stations were the first to report the problem when thousands of computers began shutting down. The problems quickly spread as companies in Europe began their workday.
British television station Sky News was unable to broadcast its morning news for hours and displayed a message apologizing for the “interruption in service.” Ryanair, one of Europe’s largest airlines, also said it was experiencing problems with a third-party IT system that was affecting flight departures.
Slovak Telekom also reported problems with its services. In a statement, it said that “the company is currently experiencing internal IT system outages due to global technical issues with CrowdStrike and products running on Windows servers. Our services such as calls, data and messaging are operating normally, but our systems are not fully available to receive customer requests at stores, contact lines or for the activation of new services.”
What is CrowdStrike and what happened?
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is assisting airlines such as Delta, United, and American Airlines with communication issues. “The FAA is closely monitoring a technical issue affecting the IT systems of US airlines,” FAA spokeswoman Jeannie Shiffer said in a statement.
“Several airlines have asked the FAA for assistance in suspending flights until the issue is resolved.” Berlin Airport is also warning of flight delays due to “technical issues.”
Many 911 emergency call centers in Alaska were also affected by the problems. One airline in India even started using handwritten boarding passes due to the outage.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers affected by a bug in a Windows update,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a post on X (Twitter).
“Mac and Linux computers are not affected. This is not a security incident or a cyberattack.” The company said it had identified the problem and deployed a fix, but fixing these computers will not be easy for IT administrators.
The main cause appears to be a kernel-level driver update that CrowdStrike uses to secure Windows computers. Although CrowdStrike identified the issue and rolled back the faulty update after “extensive reports of BSODs on Windows computers,” this does not appear to have helped computers that were already affected.
In a discussion on Reddit, hundreds of IT administrators are reporting widespread problems, and steps to work around the issue include booting affected Windows computers in safe mode, navigating to the CrowdStrike directory, and deleting a system file.
This will be problematic on some cloud servers or even for Windows laptops that are deployed and used remotely. “Our entire company is offline,” one user said on Reddit, while another said that 70% of their laptops are non-functional and stuck in a boot loop.
“Happy Friday,” said one user on Reddit. It looks like it’s going to be a long day for IT administrators around the world. In a separate outage, Microsoft also appears to be recovering from several issues with its Microsoft 365 applications and services. The root cause of these issues was “a configuration change in part of our Azure background workloads.”