The world's largest IT outage is currently being felt across the globe as millions of Windows PCs are stuck with the dreaded blue screen of death.
The IT outage has brought down critical infrastructure across the planet. An update issued by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity software company that provides Microsoft with security solutions for Windows, contained a faulty driver that caused all affected systems to boot Windows incorrectly, resulting in the now rampant blue screen of death (BSOD).
Millions of systems were disrupted, including banks, airlines, emergency services, supermarkets, payment systems, telecommunications, businesses, hospitals, stock exchanges, and more. Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella took to X to comment on the recent outage, saying Microsoft is aware of this issue that is occurring globally and is working with CrowdStrike to provide "customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online."
Luckily, CrowdStrike has already established a fix, but unfortunately, that fix must be performed manually, which means companies that rely on a lot of Windows machines will need to spend a considerable amount of time rebooting each machine as the fix requires a boot to safe mode and the deletion of a specific file. Recently, it took to its blog to share various workarounds depending on the specific system.
Moreover, CrowdStrike's CEO and founder, George Kurtz, stated on the CrowdStrike blog, "This was not a cyberattack."