Is your Windows machine giving you the blue screen of death (BSOD) this morning?

One faulty update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike is seemingly to blame, bringing down Windows PCs and servers across the globe.

That has forced users into a recovery boot loop, with machines unable to start properly.

However, this is not affecting rogue users. Instead, global businesses, including banks, supermarkets, and transport providers, have reached a standstill.

Take the aviation industry as an example, with Delta, KLM, and Ryanair among the affected brands. IndiGo, a prominent Indian airline, has even taken to handwritten boarding passes.

Meanwhile, television broadcasters have been brought offline – with Sky News taken down for hours this morning – while retailers have resorted to cash payments only.

However, most concerningly, some global healthcare organizations – like the NHS – and emergency call centers have been impacted.

For its part, Crowdstrike confirmed the widespread reports of BSODs across Windows hosts at 06:20 BST and soon isolated the issue before reverting its update.

While that may have solved the problem for some, it didn’t have a bearing on machines already stuck in the recovery boot loop.

Indeed, for many IT admins across the digital world, it promises to be a difficult end to the working week, with hundreds resorting to Reddit to share possible workarounds: the ever-reliable last resort.

Update from the CrowdStrike CEO

After hours of radio silence across social media, CrowdStrike has reposted an update from its CEO & Founder, George Kurtz, on X.

Thankfully, this seems to confirm that the issue stems from a bug in a regular security update rather than a massive cyber attack.

Meanwhile, it also discredits the theory that this was a Microsoft issue. Many first thought this was the case after an Azure outage disrupted Microsoft 365 services in the early hours of the morning, which now seems to be just an extraordinary coincidence.

Instead, CrowdStrike will likely take the flack for this, with its shares already plummeting by 11.9 percent today.

That leaves the provider of antivirus and broader threat analysis solutions for enterprises with significant reputational damage to repair.

Moreover, Kurtz’s post seems to have won few over, as many comments on his post call out the CEO for his lack of apology while others simply ask: “Have you tried switching it off and on again?”

Yet, joking aside, the situation underscores the vulnerability of countries worldwide to such outages and the potential for cybercriminals to exploit the chaos.

In addition, this highlights the risks of market consolidation, where too much of the global economy relies on too few big tech companies.

Of course, the scale of this issue is unprecedented, but it shows how easily chaos in the cloud-driven digital world can ensue.

 

 



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