Dubbed the “digital pandemic” by some, a CrowdStrike bug triggered the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) on millions of systems worldwide. The impact was widespread, hitting airlines, banks, emergency services, and TV stations.

Despite the situation, it’s important to clarify that Microsoft is not to blame. The culprit here is a faulty driver update pushed out by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which caused PCs everywhere to crash. While CrowdStrike is at fault, Microsoft has been proactive, rolling out tools to help fix the affected systems.

Last week, Microsoft released a USB Recovery Tool to tackle the CrowdStrike bug.

This tool aims to speed up the repair process, allowing IT admins to restore PCs to a pre-bug state. It offers two recovery options: WinPE and safe mode. Microsoft recommends using WinPE, though there are scenarios where the safe mode option is more appropriate, particularly if BitLocker is enabled.

The recovery key isn’t available (admin rights are needed).

A new Tech Community post from Microsoft details these options and their respective pros and cons:

Recover from WinPE (Recommended)

• Quickly and directly recovers systems.
• Does not require local admin privileges.
• Manually entering the BitLocker recovery key may be required if BitLocker is enabled.
• For third-party disk encryption, refer to vendor guidelines for recovering the drive so that the remediation script can run from WinPE.

Recover from Safe Mode

• It may allow recovery on BitLocker-enabled devices without entering recovery keys.
• Requires access to an account with local administrator rights.
• Suitable for devices using TPM-only protectors, unencrypted devices, or where the BitLocker recovery key is unknown.
• If using TPM+PIN BitLocker protectors, the user must enter the PIN or use the recovery key.
• If BitLocker is not enabled, just sign in with an admin account.
• For third-party disk encryption, consult vendors to recover the drive for the remediation script to run.

Microsoft also notes that while the USB tool is preferred, some devices can’t use USB connections. In such cases, a Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) option or reimaging the device might be necessary.

We’ll update our guide on fixing the CrowdStrike Blue Screen error on Windows 11 soon, incorporating these new methods. You can also check out Microsoft’s detailed breakdown of the process.

What is the CrowdStrike Outage?

Chances are, you’ve been impacted by the CrowdStrike outage somehow.

A vast number of companies and organizations have experienced PC crashes, and repairs are still ongoing. Even if you weren’t directly affected, the incident has been a hot topic outside tech circles.

Over the weekend, I overheard people at American football practices discussing the “Microsoft outage.” Friends and colleagues have reported similar conversations in hospitals, restaurants, and casual settings.

CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company specializing in Internet security. Their Falcon platform provides real-time attack indicators and helps security experts protect systems. Unfortunately, a buggy update to the Falcon Sensor app wreaked havoc, affecting many organizations.

The fallout grounded planes, forcing some airports to issue handwritten boarding passes. Banks, emergency services, and millions of PCs were hit hard.

While some viewed the downtime as a welcome break, the CrowdStrike outage caused significant disruption across multiple industries. Ironically, CrowdStrike’s stock plummeted, but many could not capitalize on the dip due to the bug affecting trading services.

Although a fix is now available, the repercussions of the CrowdStrike outage will be felt for a while as IT admins work tirelessly to recover and repair affected systems.

Save for users of Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.

There are reports that WSL 2 are facing issues with the environment. And the main culprit seems to be the troublesome patch KB4571756 that was released for the version 2004 of the OS, also known as the Windows 10 May 2020 Update.

Installing the cumulative update bumps up the build to 19041.508, but doing so supposedly causes the Linux environment to not load and display a “Element not found error”.

It is unclear just how widespread this issue is, but users who posted on GitHub report that the problems began surfacing right after installing the update. And by the same token, uninstalling the quality update fixed the problem.

Guilty as charged, huh?

What is also not clear is what exactly is the reason behind this problem.

Redmond has acknowledged that it is working on a fix.

But as is so often the case, it is recommended that those running production builds that rely on WSL 2 should either pause the update from installing altogether, or uninstall this particular patch by heading to the Settings panel.

In other words, some PCs that house this connectivity hardware are not able to connect to the Internet after waking up from sleep.

Let me know where you’ve heard this before!

The software titan updated the Windows 10 Health Dashboard yesterday, noting down this problem, and explaining that certain WWAN LTE modems are now creating trouble for the newest version of Windows 10 — or vice versa, what have you.

Redmond expects to fix this issue in a patch that is on track for late September, but in the meantime, it has applied a compatibility hold on devices that pack these types of chips.

That is to say that these users will not be able to upgrade to the newest version of the OS.

For users that have already installed the May 2020 Update on these machines, and are encountering this problem, Microsoft suggests a recommended workaround. It involves enabling and then disabling Airplane mode to connect to the Internet after waking up from sleep.

Oh well.

The Windows 10 May 2020 Update launched with several compatibility issues, primarily related to driver and hardware. Microsoft and its partners have managed to resolve most of these problems, though a bug with Conexant audio drivers still remains.

Fingers crossed that everything gets resolved.

And while a periodic defragging of an HDD is a good thing, since they are mechanical in nature, doing it too often on SSDs can actually degrade their integrity and shorten their lifespan. That is because the NAND flash memory cells can only be written to so many times.

In other words, you risk failure of your hardware if you defragment your SSD needlessly.

Getting back to the bug, then.

As spotted, when Redmond rolled out the Windows 10 May 2020 Update, it introduced this bug to the Optimize Drives feature causing it to incorrectly determine the last time a drive has been optimized. As a result, the OS has been defragging your SSD each time you reboot your system.

Yikes!

Windows 10 is usually able to discern whether to defrag or run a harmless TRIM process on a drive, depending on its type. But if volume snapshots are enabled, it will defrag the drive even if it is an SSD.

Luckily, the software titan has a fix in place, which has already been implemented for Insiders, and should make its way out for the general public with an upcoming update.

“Thank you for reporting that the Optimize Drives Control Panel was incorrectly showing that optimization hadn’t run on some devices. We’ve fixed it in this build.”

At this point, your best bet to sidestep the issue is to turning off this feature altogether. Type Defrag and Optimize Drives in the Windows 10 search box, then highlight your SSD. Click the Change settings link, and then uncheck Run on a schedule.

Hang tight!

It’s a virtual machine inside Windows 10, with a separate instance of the operating system that runs in a sandbox. This way, the system files are protected, with all the changes automatically reset once the application is closed.

The only problem?

Launching the app, what else?

Microsoft has acknowledged another little problem that affects Windows 10 version 1903 and up, including both the Pro and Enterprise flavors of the operating system. And this one actually affects both Windows Sandbox and the Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG).

What happens is that when you try to run any of these two, you end up with an error that prevents you from using these applications.

This issue also affects the newly released Windows 10 version 2004, though it is not exclusive to it.

There is just one workaround available right now, and luckily, it’s not all that complex. All you need to do is reboot your computer, and the issue is mitigated. Obviously, not the most ideal of solutions, which is why Redmond is working on a fix.

No specifics on when this patch goes live, but it should be soon.

August 11, the date of the next Patch Tuesday is a solid bet.

This one shows up the “No Internet” label in the system tray.

Oddly.

And that’s because the Internet connection usually works fine on these systems, meaning this is incorrect information that is displayed on these computers that have just been updated to Windows 10 May 2020 Update.

The software titan confirmed this bug in a post on TechNet, confirming that the problem is indeed under investigation:

“Customers are reporting ‘no internet’ access in the Network Connectivity Status Indicator (NCSI) on Windows 10 2004 devices on devices that in fact can ping internet resources or browse web sites with internet browsers.

Microsoft has known about this issue but haven’t resolved it yet. It is being investigated by Microsoft currently.”

A number of users reported this problem, despite their connection working fine as it is supposed to.

So, while the bug may not be severe, there is no workaround available at the time of this writing that can help you deal with it. Luckily, even though this is not a critical problem, and has no impact on the status of your Internet connectivity, Microsoft is readying a fix.

No information on when this will land, but the Patch Tuesday update cycle for August seems like a fairly good bet for this issue to be resolved.

But not anymore.

The software titan managed to fix the problem with the recently released Patch Tuesday updates. The issue caused some PCs to blue screen when plugging in a Thunderbolt dock with the Windows 10 May 2020 Update installed.

As a result, those who were using a Thunderbolt dock to extend the capabilities of their computers found that they had an upgrade block in place.

This is now being lifted.

If you have been unable to upgrade your PC to the latest version of Windows 10, then you should be able to do so soon. That is, of course, assuming that your device is not blocked for some other reason, where there are many.

Redmond actually has a whole list of known issues that are causing compatibility holds, most notable of which are related to the Surface line of devices. Microsoft recently lifted those blocks too, but later had to clarify that these users would only be unblocked if they are not being blocked by anything else.

Yeah, the Windows 10 May 2020 Update has been a bit of a mess when it comes to this.

Fine release, otherwise.

Anyway, let’s hope the company manages to get to all these problems soon. Many PCs are still blocked from upgrading, and most have not even been offered the update.

Notepad, Paint, and others.

The culprit in question is KB4565503, which was released as part of the Patch Tuesday cycle of updates this month. This cumulative update is specifically aimed at devices running Windows 10 version 2004, also known as the May 2020 Update.

Apparently, this issue only affects a small set of users.

But as these unlucky users found out, a bunch of their apps that typically come bundled with the operating system were no longer there after they deployed KB4565503 on their PCs.

These included WordPad, Notepad, and Paint, and possibly others.

In other words, they were stealth uninstalled, and the only way to get these applications back is to manually reinstall them one by one. The good news is that installing them takes but a few clicks, and only requires a visit to the optional features panel in Windows 10.

Redmond seems blissfully unaware of this problem, as the company lists only one known issue with this update. That bug is a glitch in Microsoft IME that only affects the Chinese and Japanese languages.

The good news, for the time being, is that not a lot of users are impacted by this problem.

But exercise caution, nonetheless.

Redmond has blocked it on a vast number of devices — including many a Surface machine.

All thanks to the prevalence of numerous known issues in this latest release of the operating system, many of which sneaked through even after months and months of testing. The majority of them are hardware and software incompatibility problems, thankfully.

However, that has not stopped users wanting to upgrade to Windows 10 version 2004 from complaining about problems they have encountered.

The latest round of complaints come from folks trying to use the Media Creation Tool, a nifty little piece of software that allows users to either upgrade their PCs to the newest flavor of the OS or even create a Windows 10 ISO file that they can use to install or upgrade multiple computers.

This is an app that basically helps users set up bootable media.

But even this functionality has been severely limited, with claims that installing the Windows 10 May 2020 Update using the Media Creation Tool no longer works. The process fails with a rather unusual error that does not provide much details.

See:

Not the type of error message that helps too much.

Luckily, Microsoft is on top of things this time around, with the company putting up a support page dedicated to the “0xC1900101” error.

Several workarounds are listed like removing the antivirus the antivirus and updating the BIOS. If all else fails, and none of the solutions fix the problem, the software titan suggests clean installing Windows 10.

A nuclear solution, but what can you do when left with no choice.

This was one of the talking points when the newest feature upgrade arrived.

And it still gets Surface owners talking, with many of them unable to make the upgrade their device to what the latest version of Windows 10 offers — despite investing in expensive hardware carrying the Microsoft logo.

Version 2004 has been out in the wild since May 27, available for eligible users via Windows Update and other installation methods like the Media Creation Tool and the Update Assistant.

However, despite spending 15 months in testing, the OS update came with a bunch of known issues and other undocumented incompatibilities. This resulted in Microsoft blocking the update for many users, including its own Surface devices.

Redmond did say that it removed the update block for Surface devices earlier this month, after it fixed the issue plaguing the Surface Pro 7 and the Surface Laptop 3.

But it looks like the update block is still in place for most users.

The software titan actually made changes to the original verbiage on the release information page to imply that the block was only removed for devices that may not have other safeguards that affect the device in question.

This contrasts with the earlier statement that suggested that the safeguard hold had been removed.

It’s a welcome bit of added clarity, but the issue still pesters.

Additionally, Mary Jo Foley notes that alongside the Surface Pro 7 and the Surface Laptop 3, other devices like the Surface Book 2 and the Surface Go 2 are also blocked from updating to the Windows 10 May 2020 Update.

Version 2004 was services with cumulative updates for close to six months. But even that did not prevent the newest version of Windows 10 from being a troublesome one for many users. More so, unfortunately, for users rocking Microsoft hardware.

Then again, that’s hardly surprising, keeping in view the fact that even the OneDrive app has been cited as one of the reasons for the block.