If your Windows computer is showing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) lately, don’t be too quick to judge, you are not alone. One of the most shocking bugs in CrowdStrike’s software has been making Windows systems worldwide freeze.
If you too have been facing this issue, in this article I’ll tell you a potential fix.
What’s Going On?
On Friday morning, a popular cybersecurity firm by the name of CrowdStrike released an announcement about an issue that they have found in the Falcon Sensor application. The intended use of this software, to safeguard computers from external threats, was actually making the computers freeze.
The alert provided by CrowdStrike was that users were encountering BSOD errors, which was a result of a bug in the Falcon Sensor. This is not an issue to overwhelm their technical support with tickets because their engineers are already working to address the issue 24/7. Microsoft has also been aware of the problem and they hope to sort it out in the shortest time possible.
The Global Impact
This isn’t as simple as one or two people coming across a problem or an error on their end. Windows crashes seem to have covered computers across the globe and not sparing countries such as Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, and the UK. There are many services that have been affected even in the U.S. At DownDetector, (a site mapping that records outages) indicates a sharp surge in problems impacting multiple forms of platforms and businesses such as Amazon Web Services, Instagram, eBay, Visa among others.
Airline and Business Outages
The issue has been so significant that it has resulted in other issues being posted. Some of the affected U.S carriers were American, Delta, and United Airlines; most of which experienced communication problems; some of them were grounded. Other airlines with operational issues included Ryanair in the UK which said that their booking and check-in systems were unavailable.
Other affected sectors include supermarkets, banks, telecommunication firms, and Television broadcasting stations. One particular issue dealt with users in Australia being unable to pay for groceries because electronic payment systems were not available.
How to Resolve this Issue
There are several ways to solve this problem that involves the use of both the command and persuasive approaches.
To their dismay, CrowdStrike realizes this is an, kind of bad, update that needs to be undone immediately. They’ve also provided a workaround for those still facing issues:
- Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment.
- Navigate to the C:WindowsSystem32driversCrowdStrike directory.
- Locate the file matching C-0000029*.sys and delete it.
- Boot your computer normally.
Unfortunately, this means that IT teams all over the world at the moment are working hard to carry out this fix for millions of machines, which will take a while.
Market Reactions
This problem has had repercussion on CrowdStrike in the stock exchange as can be observed from the current market standings. The impact is already reflected in their stock, which dropped by over 21% on Friday, before the market opened, consequently lowering the company’s market capitalization by $16 billion. Which is a lot of zeros vanishing into the great cyber space.
What’s Next?
Until further patched, if you are a victim of this one, stick to CrowdStrike’s mitigation and expect further instructions from both CrowdStrike and Microsoft on the matter. For those with limited experience with these tools, this event is a rude reminder of how integrated our digital lives are with software running as intended.
