‘Blue screen of death’ for global Microsoft users

Windows 10 users around the world are being met with a “blue screen of death” after a massive Microsoft outage.

The global software issue, reportedly linked to the American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, has forced many banks, airlines and broadcasters to go offline, and caused many Windows computers to crash suddenly.

Amid the outage, social media users have shared photos of their screens stuck on the recovery page with the message on the screen reading: “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly. If you’d like to restart and try again, choose Restart my PC below.”

Troy Hunt, the creator of the data breach checking website Have I Been Pwned, wrote on X: “Something super weird happening right now: just been called by several totally different media outlets in the last few minutes, all with Windows machines suddenly BSoD’ing (Blue Screen of Death). Anyone else seen this?”

Another user posted a photo of their work laptop with the blue screen of death displayed, while their personal laptop appeared to work perfectly.

“#bluescreen error on work laptop running Windows 11.. meanwhile in the background, personal laptop running Windows 7 working perfectly fine,” they wrote.

In a post on its website, CrowdStrike said: “CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows related to the Falcon Sensor.”

“Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheckblue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor. Our Engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket,” the company said.

Blue Screen errors, also known as black screen errors or STOP code errors, can occur when a critical issue forces Windows to unexpectedly shut down or restart.

The system crash has seemingly been reported worldwide.

Microsoft, in a statement, said it was taking “mitigation actions” after service issues. “Our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions,” the company said in a post on X.

The company added that a number of its products had been restored.

Among the services still impacted is Microsoft Teams, on which users may be unable to access group chats. Microsoft Purview, Microsoft 365 admin center, Microsoft Fabric, and PowerBI are all still affected, the company said.

Tracking website Down Detector registered outages and problems at several companies including Delta Airlines, Visa, Mastercard, Lloyds Bank, Santander, Amazon, RyanAir, Sky News, Ladbrokes, BT, and Microsoft Teams.

U.S.-based Frontier Airlines said that the Microsoft outage had affected its systems. “During this time booking, check-in, access to your boarding pass, and some flights may be impacted,” the company said on X.

Delta, United and American airlines were all grounded in the U.S., according to the Federal Aviation Authority.

Meanwhile, British broadcaster Sky News was temporarily unable to broadcast live on Friday morning, with viewers presented with an error message stating: “We apologize for the interruption to this broadcast. We hope to restore the transmission of Sky News shortly.”

In a post on social media, CrowdStrike confirmed that the global IT outage was “not a security incident or cyberattack”. It said: “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

In the same post, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the outage was caused by a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”