Fix Released for CrowdStrike Global IT Outage, But Many Systems Worldwide Still Offline

A faulty cybersecurity update brought the computer-aided world on Microsoft Windows computers down yesterday, sparking a global outage that caused thousands of PCs and servers to hit the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). It caused havoc in the banking, airlines, businesses, and supermarkets with IT administrators worldwide trying to identify a fix. Both CrowdStrike and Microsoft have issued a common mitigation but remediation may require some time after full resolution.

More About CrowdStrike Faulty Update and Fix

Major businesses – particularly those being serviced by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which was recently dragged into the mix after a sensor configuration update for its cloud-based platform Falcon caused thousands or even millions of Windows PCs to crash and hard crashes – are facing downtime. The issue began Friday morning after the update had dropped.

The crash led to a global disruption in industries such as healthcare, airline systems, and banking among others have suddenly realized that their PCs had encountered BSOD errors and were stopped dead on track. Although One of the origin was identified and CrowdStrike also remediated it, complete removal could potentially take a long time. CrowdStrike, as reported by The Verge, provided a temporary fix to recover PCs by booting into Safe Mode. The steps are:

• Boot Windows into Safe Mode.
• Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory.
• Locate and delete the “C-00000291*sys” file.
• Restart the host.

This will cause Windows to boot in Safe Mode and not load third-party drivers (such as CrowdStrike). Microsoft also noted a workaround, which many IT administrators are running, repeatedly rebooting the PC, up to 15 times. Information on the method and specifics of this resolution were detailed by Microsoft on its Azure outage support page.

Since the servers are so heavily bombarded with reboot requests from infected machines, they can also take quite some time to respond. Some of these fixes have helped revive some systems, but all other Windows systems may still require additional time to be fully recovered. CrowdStrike accepted responsibility for the faulty update and the resulting disruption, but users remain puzzled by the extent of the outage caused by a single update.

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