What causes the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” on Windows?

July 19, 2024

New Delhi:

A serious technical issue has affected millions of Windows computer systems worldwide, causing them to shut down or restart suddenly. Microsoft Inc. said the bug was caused by a recent CrowdStrike update.

According to Microsoft’s Service Health Status updates, the preliminary root cause is “a configuration change in some of our Azure backend workloads that caused disconnections between storage and compute resources and resulted in connection failures…”

These outages, according to the company, affected “downstream (and dependent) Microsoft 365 services.”

CrowdStrike Engineering, a cybersecurity services company working with Microsoft, identified a content delivery related to this issue and reverted these changes.

The company has published workarounds for affected Windows users.

Workaround

Start Windows in Safe Mode or in the Windows Recovery Environment.
Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory.
Find the file that matches C-00000291*.sys and delete it.
Restart the host normally.

What Microsoft said

In a detailed thread on X, the software services giant said it is “investigating an issue that is impacting users’ ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services.”

READ | Blue Screen of Death error appears when restarting Windows systems

“We are working to reroute affected traffic to alternative systems to mitigate the impact more quickly,” Microsoft said, adding: “We continue to see a positive trend in service availability as we continue to reroute affected traffic.”

“We continue to expect that users will continue to experience gradual relief as we continue to contain the issue.”

The services are undergoing “continuous improvements as we continue to take measures to mitigate risks.”

READ | What Microsoft said after the global outage in airline and banking operations

“We will continue to treat this event with the highest priority and urgency as we continue to address the ongoing impact to the remaining Microsoft 365 apps that are in a compromised state.”

Affected and restoring Microsoft services

According to Microsoft, affected services may include services and software such as PowerBI, Fabric and Teams, as well as the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

READ | Flights, markets, banks, stock exchange: Microsoft outage paralyzes industries

It also said that “internal telemetry and customer signals” indicated that some services had been at least partially restored. These include Defender, OneNote, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online.

Impact of global Windows outages

Services around the world were affected, including key providers such as police and government.

In India, SpiceJet said there were “technical issues” affecting online ticket booking and check-in, as well as other functions.

“We ask passengers with upcoming travel plans to arrive at the airport earlier than usual to complete check-in at our counters,” the airline said on X.

New airline Akasa Air and industry veteran IndiGo have issued similar announcements. Flight traffic at Chennai and Mumbai airports has also been affected, sources told NDTV.

The Australian airline Virgin Australia announced worldwide that it was “aware of a large-scale IT outage impacting airlines and other businesses” and that it was also affected.

“We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible…,” the airline said.

There are reports of flight bans in Australia and the USA.

In Australia, Sydney and Melbourne airports have cited a “global technology issue” as the reason for the disruption to their services. Both airports said contingency plans had been activated.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported disruptions to operations at the airport in the German capital Berlin, and Spanish airport operators confirmed an “incident” at their facilities, the BBC reported.

The technical problem has also affected banks and financial service providers. The London Stock Exchange is reportedly struggling with minor problems. The British news channel Sky News is not on air, according to the BBC.

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Rihondo