Blue Screens All Over the Place

What’s up!

This is theInTersectionof, and this is your daily dose of feel good tech and cool gear that will change your life

Here’s what connects with you today:

  • Windows machines all over the globe are frozen on blue screens

  • What exactly happened and what’s the fix

2 min read

Table of Contents

Welcome Wagon

It’s a commonality in all of IT, but especially in Managed services work that things will break. We apply contingency after contingency and yet it still happens. In fact a big part of IT support is the ‘break/fix’ model. This is usually the ‘lowest’ tier of support if you work in the managed services space, but it works like this: a system breaks and your ‘IT guy’ (your provider) fixes it. The break can be caused by any number of things, typically user error 😉, the “how” doesn’t really matter, it will be fixed.

Some years back the stigma was that updates, particularly Windows updates would always break something. And it’s understandable after all as Windows tends to be a one-stop shop for most organizations with various software packages, drivers, and tools. Nowadays, that stigma has for the most part been replaced with a proper understanding that updates are positive. They keep our systems running fresh and lightweight, and probably more importantly secure.

Still, sometimes, SOMETIMES an update can still bring it all down.

Happy International Blue Screen of Death Day

So, the last 10 hrs or so were quite eventful in the IT space.

Was it a cyber attack, was it a major outbreak of some new exploit, did our clocks roll back to the REAL Y2K and we didn’t know about it.

Nope, it seems it simply was an update, a simple update that broke everything. Well that’s hyperbole, but it broke many devices running Crowdstrike software which is pretty popular security tools for many organizations.

So, how did this happen? Simply put, in Crowdstrike’s efforts to keep their software up to date, they pushed an automatic update that ended up crashing systems. The Windows machines immediately crashed to the BSOD Blue Screen of Death. They then went into a blue screen boot loop and then no dice on booting into Windows.

Statement on Falcon Content Update for Windows Hosts - crowdstrike.com

www.crowdstrike.com/blog/statement-on-falcon-content-update-for-windows-hosts

It’s interesting how many systems were down. Banks, airlines, News agencies, and businesses all over the world were affected. Crowdstrikes CEO did issue an apology and an update (See link above) on how to fix the machines. Hats off to all the IT folks out there that are working on the issue!

theInTersectionof