Major Windows BSOD Issue Takes Banks, Airlines, Broadcasters Offline

Thousands of Windows machines are experiencing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issue at startup today, affecting banks, airlines, TV stations, supermarkets and many other companies around the world. A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike is taking affected PCs and servers offline, forcing them into a recovery boot loop so the machines can’t start properly. CrowdStrike is widely used by many companies around the world to manage the security of Windows PCs and servers.

Australian banks, airlines and TV stations first raised the alarm when thousands of machines began going offline. The problems are now spreading as companies based in Europe begin their workdays. British broadcaster Sky News is currently cannot transmit your morning news bulletins, and it is showing a message apologizing for the “interruption of this transmission”. Ryanair, one of Europe’s largest airlines, also says he is experimenting a “third party” IT issue that is affecting flight departures.

The US Federal Aviation Administration says all flights of Delta, United and American Airlines are suspended due to a “communication issue”. Berlin airport is also Notice of travel delays due to “technical problems”.

“We have widespread reports of BSODs on Windows hosts, occurring across multiple sensor versions,” says CrowdStrike in a support note issued at 1:20 a.m. ET today. CrowdStrike identified the problem and rolled back the faulty update, but this does not appear to help machines that were already affected.

On a Reddit Thread, hundreds of IT administrators are reporting widespread problems, and alternative steps involve booting affected Windows machines into safe mode and navigating to the CrowdStrike directory and deleting a file from the system. This will be problematic on some cloud-based servers or even remotely deployed and used Windows laptops.

“Our entire company is offline,” says one Reddit poster, while another says 70% of their laptops are turned off and stuck in a boot loop. “Happy Friday,” says one Reddit poster. It looks like it’s going to be a long day for IT administrators around the world.

In what appears to be a separate outage, Microsoft is also recovering due to multiple issues with its Microsoft 365 applications and services. The root cause of these issues was “a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads.”