Blue Screen of Death – Microsoft asks you to turn it off and on again over and over again

While the whole world is seemingly still trying to come to terms with what has quickly become the world’s biggest IT outage, Microsoft’s blue screen of death has been introduced to a new generation of users thanks to the CrowdStrike update fiasco. But what is it and how do you fix it? Microsoft has taken a cue from the IT crowd, suggesting that the solution is to turn it off and on again 15 times.

What is the Blue Screen of Death?

Microsoft introduced the Blue Screen of Death, also known as BSOD, to Windows 3.0 users back in 1993. To get technical for a minute, the Blue Screen of Death is more formally known as a stop error. It is pretty much what it sounds like: a critical error that caused the Windows operating system to crash.

The blue screen problem “often indicates conflicts or errors at the kernel level,” said Mike Walters, co-founder of Action1. “Such errors are particularly difficult to diagnose and fix because they occur at the deepest levels of the operating system, where detailed interactions with the hardware take place.” In the past, however, these stop errors have also occurred due to problems with faulty memory or overheating issues.

Microsoft changed the color of the Blue Screen of Death for Windows 11 users to black in July 2021, but returned to the familiar blue at the end of the year.

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Victims of the CrowdStrike update were asked to turn it off and on again over and over again…

The blue screen of death is the result, but the cause of the worldwide IT outage was a CrowdStrike update. The official fix from CrowdStrike itself is to manually boot each machine into safe mode and roll up your sleeves with the usual procedure. My colleague Kate O’Flaherty has an excellent explanation that helps with this. However, Microsoft has also entered the user support fray with an official solution for users of Azure VMs affected by the CrowdStrike bug.

Microsoft said it has “noted that some Azure VMs are successfully updated via the CrowdStrike Falcon agent after multiple manual virtual machine restarts.” Customers are advised to try the following:

• Using the Azure portal – Attempt to ‘restart’ affected VMs
• Using Azure CLI or Azure Shell
• Please note that in some cases multiple reboots may be required.

“Multiple reboots should not normally be necessary unless there are additional underlying problems,” Walters warned, adding, “Sometimes, if the system has not been rebooted for years, the reboot at boot time can cause certain problems. Other problems can occur with databases that may not work due to an incorrect reboot after boot.”

Dealing with Blue Screens of Death outside of CrowdStrike Drama

For anyone experiencing a Blue Screen of Death and the Stop error is not related to the current CrowdStrike issue, Microsoft offers the following advice:

“These errors can be caused by both hardware and software issues. If you added new hardware to your PC before the blue screen error, shut down your PC, remove the hardware, and try restarting. If you’re having trouble restarting, you can start your PC in Safe Mode. You can also try getting the latest updates using Windows Update, getting help from other sources, or restoring Windows to an earlier point in time.”

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