CrowdStrike says "a significant number" of impacted Windows devices are now back online
The outage affected roughly 8.5 million computers since Friday
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Key notes
- CrowdStrike’s update caused 8.5 million Windows computers to crash with BSOD.
- Microsoft released a recovery tool using a bootable USB to fix the issue automatically.
- CrowdStrike issued updates and is testing new techniques for system remediation.
An update from CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor caused roughly 8.5 million Windows computers around the world to experience the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) since Friday, something described as the worst IT outage in history.
Days after that, the company finally launched an update, saying that a ” significant number are back online and operational.”
“Together with customers, we tested a new technique to accelerate impacted system remediation. We’re in the process of operationalizing an opt-in to this technique. We’re making progress by the minute,” the company says.
George Kurtz, the company’s CEO, said the other day on X that the issue stemmed from “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
Airlines, businesses, supermarkets, hospitals, and other enterprises have then resorted to the manual ways: an airport in India has reportedly issued customers’ boarding passes manually by handwriting, and a handful of TV stations in the UK were also affected by the outage.
Microsoft has also released a recovery tool amid the CrowdStrike fiasco. It creates a bootable USB drive that simplifies the recovery process by booting into the Windows PE environment and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file, thus avoiding the need to boot into Safe Mode or requiring admin rights manually.
Additionally, Microsoft has provided separate recovery steps for Windows Virtual Machines on Azure and all Windows 10 and 11 devices on their support site. CrowdStrike has also issued an update to fix the issue but not all machines can receive it automatically.
