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.

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.