‘Blue screen of death’ hits NYC gov’t computers; jail cameras, arrest software down in ‘unprecedented’ global tech outage

The dreaded “blue screen of death” hit non-critical computers en masse in New York City’s government offices after a failed tech update crippled Microsoft worldwide.

Jail cameras, arrest processing software and other city governmental functions were affected by the outage Friday, but 911 and emergency systems remained untouched, city officials said.

Mayor Eric Adams pinned the mass crash on CrowdStrike, a US cybersecurity firm that sent out a faulty overnight software update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

“They sent out a software update that inadvertently took our systems offline,” Adams said from City Hall on Friday morning. “This was not a cyberattack.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul called the CrowdStrike failure — which rippled across New York City and the Empire State governmental agencies — an “unprecedented situation.”

She promised “maximum flexibility” by the state for problems, such as New Yorkers missing DMV deadlines.

“This is a major, major public safety issue,” she said.

“This has had a widespread impact on hospital systems.”

The outage’s total impact on city government computers remained unclear Friday morning, but sources said City Council members’ computers were down, as were non-critical devices in NYPD headquarters.

Screens in entire city governmental offices showed the “blue screen of death” — an ominous error message thrown up by the Windows operating system — during the morning, sources said.

Phil Banks, deputy mayor for public safety, said city Department of Corrections cameras and arrest processing software were affected.

Beyond city government, the outage hit most of the computers in the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, sources said.

Criminal arraignments were temporarily halted amid the outage, sources said.

“Due to the outage this office is unable to answer questions,” one handwritten sign on a court clerk’s office stated.

Scores of travelers at JFK and LaGuardia airports were also left stranded by the unprecedented and wide-scale internet disruption.

Matthew Fraser, the city’s chief technology officer, told NBC News that there has never been a problem of this scale for government entities.

He said the outage thankfully appeared to bypass literal life-or-death computer systems.

“Fortunately for us, our most critical systems — 911, 311, other things like our traffic management systems and our water management systems — live in a space where this type of impact will not impact the systems,” he said.

“So, as it stands right now, our most critical systems are up and running.”

Additional reporting by Kyle Schnitzer and Ben Kochman