Thousands of Windows computers around the world were hit with a blue screen of death (BSOD) this morning, due to a recent update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. The outage paralyzed some banks, airlines, television companies, supermarkets and many other businesses.
According to The Verge, an update from CrowdStrike is causing Windows to fail to boot correctly, causing a reboot loop and requiring a restore procedure. The issue affects both client and server versions of Windows.
Banks, airlines and TV companies in Australia were the first to face the problem. Now the problem has spread to Europe, where companies are just starting their working day.
British broadcaster Sky News is unable to broadcast its morning news bulletins and is displaying a message apologizing for the "interrupted broadcast".
Ryanair, one of the largest airlines in Europe, is experiencing problems with sending flights. American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Airlines have been forced to suspend flights completely.
Berlin Brandenburg International Airport has also suspended operations - planes cannot land.
CrowdStrike support said that they are receiving multiple reports of BSODs on Windows hosts, occurring on multiple software versions. The company has already identified the issue and paused the rollout of the update. However, this will not help computers that have already installed the update.
CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon program. Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon sensor. According to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, Mac and Linux hosts were not affected, and the defect in the code was in one content update for Windows hosts. All of the company's engineering and development teams are fully mobilized and are working to ensure the security and stability of customers' IT infrastructure.
One of the company's main products is CrowdStrike Falcon, which "delivers highly accurate real-time detection and automated protection" against potential cybersecurity threats. Falcon's security service is used by large corporations and government contractors. The issue is related to Falcon Sensor, a program designed to block cyberattacks. The software also records and logs actions, which is necessary for rapid threat detection.
As a temporary solution, you can use the instructions below, but they do not help in all cases.
- Start Windows in Safe Mode or WRE.
- Go to folder C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike.
- Find and delete the files
C-00000291*.sys. - Start Windows in normal mode.
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Where was A.I. – On a coffee break ??? –
Ah shit, here we go again! The Y2K scenario but CrowdStrike update screwed millions of Microsoft Windows machines worldwide.
I’m glad that the whole world can see what a shitty company CrowdStrike is, our team has been in the software industry for years and CrowdStrike is a worthless piece of software that gives stupid warnings even to clean files. I hope this company goes bankrupt.
George Kurtz – CEO of the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which he co-founded with Dmitri Alperovitch.
He graduated from Seton Hall University with a degree in accounting
1. CrowdStrike Update Causes Billions of Dollars in Losses by Breaking One Billion (Or more) Windows Machines (New)
2. CrowdStrike also broke Debian and Rocky Linux earlier this year (Not old)
https://www.techspot.com/news/103899-crowdstrike-also-broke-debian-rocky-linux-earlier-year.html
3. In October 2009, McAfee promoted George Kurtz to chief technology officer and executive vice president. Six months later, McAfee accidentally disrupted its customers’ operations around the world when it pushed out a software update that deleted critical Windows XP system files and caused affected systems to bluescreen and enter a boot loop. “I’m not sure any virus writer has ever developed a piece of malware that shut down as many machines as quickly as McAfee did today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kurtz
Note : This guy’s whole life has been full of failures and his only characteristic is that he is an American, someone who made one of his mistakes would never get a job again.