Over the past few days, thousands of Windows machines are experiencing a serious problem with the blue screen of death (BSOD) at launch, affecting banks, airlines, television stations, supermarkets and many other businesses around the world.
A faulty update from your cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike sta taking offline affected PCs and servers, throwing them into a reboot loop that prevents the machines from booting properly. The problem is not caused by Microsoft, but by third-party software CrowdStrike, which is widely used by many companies to manage the security of Windows PCs and servers.
Australian banks, airlines and TV stations were the first to sound the alarm as thousands of machines began to shut down. The problem quickly spread as European businesses began their workdays. British broadcaster Sky News was unable to broadcast its morning news for hours, displaying a message apologizing for the disruption. Also Ryanairone of Europe’s largest airlines, has reported a “third-party” IT issue that is impacting flight departures.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is assisting airlines such as Delta, United and American Airlines due to communication issues. “The FAA is closely monitoring a technical issue impacting the IT systems of U.S. airlines,” said FAA spokeswoman Jeannie Shiffer. “Several airlines have requested FAA assistance with grounding their fleets until the issue is resolved.”
Berlin Airport warns of flight delays due to “technical issues.” Many 911 call centers in Alaska were also affected. One airline in India even switched to handwritten boarding passes due to the disruption.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a flaw found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a post on X. “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyber attack.”
CrowdStrike has identified the issue and released a fix, but fixing it won’t be easy for IT admins. The root cause appears to be an update to the kernel-level driver that CrowdStrike uses to protect Windows machines. While CrowdStrike identified the issue and rolled back the faulty update after “numerous reports of BSODs on Windows hosts,” that doesn’t appear to help machines that are already affected.
In a Reddit thread, hundreds of IT administrators are reporting widespread issues, and the fix steps involve booting the affected Windows machines into Safe Mode, navigating to the CrowdStrike directory, and deleting a system file. This could be problematic on some cloud-based servers or even Windows laptops deployed and used remotely.
“Our entire company is offline,” one Redditor says, while another reports that 70% of their laptops are stuck in a boot loop. It looks like it’s going to be a long day for IT admins everywhere.
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Source: www.iphoneitalia.com
