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.

A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike is knocking affected PCs and servers offline, forcing them into a recovery boot loop so machines can’t start properly. CrowdStrike is widely used by many businesses worldwide to manage the security of Windows PCs and servers.

Australian banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters first raised the alarm as thousands of machines started to go offline. The issues spread fast as businesses based in Europe started their work day.

UK broadcaster Sky News could not broadcast its morning news bulletins for hours this morning and showed a message apologizing for “the interruption to this broadcast.” Ryanair, one of the biggest airlines in Europe, also says it’s experiencing a “third-party” IT issue, impacting flight departures.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says it’s assisting airlines like Delta, United, and American Airlines due to communications issues. “The FAA is closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at US airlines,” says FAA spokesperson Jeannie Shiffer in a statement to The Verge. “Several airlines have requested FAA assistance with ground stops for their fleets until the issue is resolved.”

Berlin airport also warns of travel delays due to “technical issues.” The issues have also impacted many 911 emergency call centers in Alaska. One airline in India has even turned to handwritten boarding passes due to the outages.

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” says CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz in a post on X. “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack.”

CrowdStrike says the issue has been identified, and a fix has been deployed, but fixing these machines won’t be simple for IT admins. The root cause appears to be an update to the kernel-level driver that CrowdStrike uses to secure Windows machines.

While CrowdStrike identified the issue and reverted the faulty update after “widespread reports of BSODs on Windows hosts,” it doesn’t appear to help machines that have already been impacted.

In a Reddit thread, hundreds of IT admins are reporting widespread issues. The workaround involves booting affected Windows machines into safe mode, navigating to the CrowdStrike directory, and deleting a system file. That will be troublesome on some cloud-based servers or even for Windows laptops deployed and used remotely.

“Our entire company is offline,” says one Reddit poster, while another says 70 percent of their laptops are down and stuck in a boot loop. “Happy Friday,” says one Reddit poster. It looks like IT admins worldwide will have a long day.

In what appears to be a separate outage, Microsoft is also recovering from several issues with its Microsoft 365 apps and services. The root cause of those issues was “a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads.”

And now, there is an actual BSOD bug on the loose!

Microsoft has just confirmed another pesky little bug in the operating system, this time caused by some suspicious-looking Intel SST drivers that are triggering the Blue Screen of Death on devices running this version of the operating system.

Or Black Screen of Death, in case Redmond has not reverted the color back on your machine.

In case you are not aware of Intel SST, it is an integrated audio digital signal processor (DSP) that handles and processes audio signals on many modern Intel devices—that is, a lot of the hardware that is out there.

The company details the problem on its health status page, describing the issue as:

“Intel and Microsoft have found incompatibility issues with certain versions of drivers for Intel Smart Sound Technology (Intel SST) and Windows 11. Windows 11 devices with the affected Intel SST driver might receive an error with a blue screen.”

The good news is that only certain versions of the Intel Smart Sound Technology Audio Controller drivers are being affected.

Redmond notes that the issue exists on SST driver versions 10.29.0.5152 and earlier or 10.30.0.5152 and earlier. Hence, the solution to fix this problem is to update to driver versions 10.30.00.5714 and later or 10.29.00.5714 and later.

Nevertheless, Microsoft has already enabled an upgrade block that ensures that devices that might potentially be affected by this bug are no longer being offered the upgrade to Windows 11.

The software titan assures that after the driver is updated, the Windows 11 upgrade prompt should appear on your machine within 48 hours.

It better, as the company is ready to pick up pace as most other rollout metrics are in the positive.

Yes, the dreaded error screen is something that most Windows users have likely experienced when a problem occurs with a device driver on their system or perhaps due to faulty hardware, even an aggressive overclock.

It is very much a part of the Windows experience.

A blue affair since time immemorial, the BSOD has been a part of the OS since Windows 1.0. It has evolved over the years with the addition of debugging and QR codes that can help users determine the cause of a problem.

But the most notable visual change to the error screen since its inception was the dark shade Microsoft applied to it in the latest version of its operating system.

For some odd and unexplained reason, the company chose to change the traditional blue screen to a black screen in Windows 11. It never talked about why it made the change, but it probably was introduced as a way to make the new OS feel different.

You know, along with the rest of the UI overhaul.

What’s even more puzzling is why it has chosen to revert back to the blue screen. Is it feedback that they got from users? The blue color is a nostalgia thing, after all, so it may not be surprising to see the public demanding it back.

If that’s the case, then the company has listened.

Insider build 22000.346 made its way out to the Beta and Release Preview channels a few days ago. Among the many fixes it brought, it also saw a reversion back to the color blue for the BSOD. Since only the background color was different, it probably was not too difficult for Redmond.

If you recall, the software titan made a similar change back in 2016 when it introduced the Green Screen of Death for Insider preview builds in order to make it easier to distinguish them from builds on the final stable version.

With Windows 11 now public, Microsoft probably felt it was time to return to the blue roots of this error screen.

After all, this move left a mountain of devices unsupported, including the company’s own Surface Laptop, Surface Pro 5, and Surface Go.

But apparently, the software titan has a good reason why it outlined these tough system requirements for the upcoming OS. And as it recently explained in a dedicated blog post, it all came down to the reliability of the experience.

In internal testing, Redmond observed a spike in Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) errors due to old driver support on unsupported hardware.

This is particularly troublesome on a modern operating system like Windows 11:

“Maintaining reliability over time is highly correlated with OEM and IHV driver support. The processors supported on Windows 11 are within OEM and IHV support and use modern (DCH) drivers. The move to modern drivers enables drivers and associated software to be installed and serviced in a coordinated manner through Windows Update and provides better mechanisms for tracking driver health.”

Telemetry data collected from PCs running the builds in the Windows Insider Program highlighted a major risk of these types of errors on older, unsupported hardware.

Microsoft found that Windows 11 was plagued with two main problems on outdated machines.

First being that unsupported devices had 52% more kernel mode crashes, while compatible devices provided a 99.8% crash-free experience. Secondly, applications hanging was 17% more likely on unsupported machines, and this figure grew to 43% for the first-party Microsoft aps.

This led to the software titan taking the tough road of only supporting processors that followed its OEM and IHV guidelines and using modern drivers.

Ultimately providing the added benefit of better performance on Windows 11.

That is to say, fatal errors in the new operating system now come with a black background.

Windows 11 comes with a bucketful of improvements, mostly centered around spiffing up the UI of the operating system. There are rounded corners, a new Start Menu, and features like native support for running Android apps.

But there are other subtle changes scattered throughout as well.

Microsoft, it seems, took the opportunity to refresh the infamous BSOD with a new coat of paint. Now called the Black Screen of Death, this is how Windows 11 throws up an error message when things go really, really wrong:

The reason behind this change, you ask?

One, it could simply be a change for the sake of it. Microsoft is giving pretty much all areas of the operating system a look, so why not this. Or, it could be dictated via the rise of OLED screens, where black colors absolutely shine.

Besides, it’s hard to tell whether this is a temporary change, or if Redmond actually does want to make this screen black in the full version of the operating system. It could well be the company simply testing things out with the Insider builds in a bid to gain some feedback.

The company did something similar with Windows 10, if you recall.

A couple of years back, as part of its program testing, the software titan introduced a new color specifically for Windows Insiders where the preview builds threw up a green error screen. They were technically called the Green Screen of Death.

So, this could just be another change in that vein.

Besides, considering just how stable and reliable Windows 11 is overall, this new BSOD will not show too often in the first place. Unlike, you know, the horror days of Windows 98.

Since Microsoft has not offered any information on the Black Screen of Death, it will be interesting to see if this change sticks in the final version of Windows 11 or we get a return of its blue sibling that has terrorized Windows users through the ages.

Or rather, a PC with old drivers.

Microsoft began rolling out this newly minted version of the operating system that goes by as the Windows 10 May 2020 Update. It has an abundance of new features, and no shortage of welcome improvements.

However, even the long testing period for this version did nothing to prevent hiccups — hiccups that included the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.

Redmond has confirmed that the May 2020 Update could lead to BSOD errors if you force it on a computer with older drivers. It even made it a point to warn that PCs that are running NVIDIA display driver version 358.00 or older are most at risk of these problems.

Worryingly, if you force it on a PC with older drivers, then there is a sure chance that you will run into these issues.

And this is one of the reasons why the company has put blocks on upgrades for these devices, even going so far as to let users know that their hardware is currently incompatible.

Likewise, folks have also encountered another bug with certain audio drivers. Same goes for when plugging or unplugging a Thunderbolt dock — this too results in a stop error with a blue screen.

These are just a few examples of the many issues that users are facing with this latest release.

Moral of the story? Be sure you have upgraded drivers at all costs. Or wait for Microsoft to fix these issues before deploying the May 2020 Update. The company is already on it, and it should not take long for it to atomize these problems.

Apparently, that is not the case — not when it comes to Surface devices, at least.

Because, as reported, some of these machines are being bricked soon after they were upgraded to Windows 10 version 1803 and deployed this cumulative update. Surface Book 2 is the device affected, and the only workaround being to completely uninstall this particular update.

And then block it from being offered.

Otherwise, it’s BSOD galore.

Now, Blue Screens of Death are a rare occurrence on Windows 10 systems these days, compared to the all or nothing days of Windows 98 and Windows XP, obviously. But these types of bugs can be particularly nasty.

And not what one should expect from such an expensive piece of hardware like the Surface Book 2.

Anyway, Redmond has put up a workaround for this issue, confirming that it has blocked the Surface Book 2 from getting the update. Those who have not installed it yet are recommended to wait for a new cumulative update.

“After installing this optional update some users may get a blue or black screen with error code, “System thread exception not handled.” For customers who are currently experiencing this issue, please follow these instructions Troubleshoot blue screen errors and uninstall KB4467682.

 

For Surface Book 2 customers, we are only blocking this optional update. You will receive the required December 2018 security update release. A resolution for this issue will be available in the December 2018 security update release.”

Fix coming next week, then.

As part of the December 2018 Patch Tuesday release cycle, where Microsoft will release updates for all versions of Windows 10, hoping that the recent bugs plaguing the system become history.

What’s interesting, though, is the fact that some users who uninstalled and removed this cumulative update from their systems are hit with other issues, like Windows Hello being broken. To make thing worse, Microsoft is yet to provide any information in this regard.

Windows XP was particularly notorious for this, and is widely regarded as the version of Windows with the highest average amount of BSOD errors — mostly due to drive issues that caused incompatibility between software applications and hardware.

Well, you may be pleased to know that they are now becoming a thing of the past.

ZDNet is reporting that Microsoft has focused heavily on this in Windows 8, and the company has managed to improve its flagship operating system in such a way that users are seldom provided with this particular (and horrifying) kind of error.

That is not the case for Windows XP, though.

Device drivers are said to be responsible for no less than 85 percent of the BSOD screens that show up in the old operating system that still powers around 31 percent of computers worldwide.

But Microsoft has implemented a series of enhancements and tools that are capable of detecting and fixing these driver errors in Windows 8. The new OS also lets users know in advanced about any potential errors that may occur, and provides them with options to download and install drivers.

That’s not to say that BSOD errors have completely disappeared in the newer versions of the OS.

Both Windows 7 and Windows 8 are much more stable, but according to data released by web analytics service Soluto earlier this year, Windows 8 users get an average of 0.28 BSOD screens every month, while Windows 7 users get these errors 0.33 times on average every 30 days.

Plus, since the Blue Screen of Death does not show up as often in Windows 8, Microsoft has redesigned the error screen with a smiley face so users don’t get angry when their monitors turns blue.

As we reported last week, the update pretty much wreaked havoc on Windows 7 installations, pushing all computers in a scarily continuous reboot loop — one that could not be fixed without manually removing the said bulletin.

Microsoft acted swiftly and not only removed the update from the Download Center, but also promised a fix while recommending users to uninstall KB2823324 as soon as possible. Late last week Redmond issued a statement providing more information on the matter:

“We’ve determined that the update, when paired with certain third-party software, can cause system errors. As a precaution, we stopped pushing 2823324 as an update when we began investigating the error reports, and have since removed it from the download center.”

The company had already hinted early on that this issue was most probably caused by a compatibility problem with some third-party software.

Partners in crime include an online banking plugin installed by a lot of Brazilian users, as well as security products like Kaspersky and Trend Micro, both of which do not get along very well with the new update.

Both these software solutions are automatically disabled on Windows 7 computers after the buggy patch is deployed — for the time being, at least, as Microsoft scampers to release a fix in the coming days.

Until it arrives, make sure you remove the updated labeled KB2823324, and block it from being installed on your Windows 7 machine.