A Microsoft outage that began Thursday night crippled airlines, financial, healthcare and energy companies around the world, leaving many with a “blue screen of death” on their work computers. In response, Microsoft released a recovery tool Saturday to repair Windows machines affected by the bug, a day after CrowdStrike shared instructions on how to fix a crashed PC.
CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company whose software protects small and large businesses from cyberattacks and other online threats, said it caused the malfunction when it pushed out a software update with a glitch that caused Windows computers running the company’s software to crash. The bug does not affect Mac and Linux computers. “We understand the seriousness of this situation and apologize for the inconvenience and disruption,” the company said in a statement.
The consequences were dire. Travelers were stranded at the airport. Hospital appointments were postponed or canceled. And employees were unable to work, all because of this software update, which caused the infamous blue screen of death on Windows PCs with the CrowdStrike glitch.
While most people will just have to wait for the issue to resolve, if you are experiencing the issue yourself and are experiencing the blue screen on your PC, there is a solution available for you. CrowdStrike has posted this solution on their website.
If you see this, it means that your system has crashed.
How to Fix Your Microsoft Windows PC Affected by the CrowdStrike Bug
Microsoft released an update to its Microsoft Download Center on Saturday a USB tool that it can help IT administrators with the repair process. The tool requires that you have administrator rights and a BitLocker recovery key for each Windows PC. Microsoft also posted recovery steps to prevent PCs from rebooting repeatedly due to the broken CrowdStrike update.
On Friday, CrowdStrike said it had identified the issue and sent a fix. “We are referring customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to post full and continuous updates on our website.”
The first thing you should try to fix the blue screen of death is Reboot your Windows computer until CrowdStrike’s fix is available. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz appeared on Friday NBC’s “Today” Show and said, “Many customers are restarting the system and now it is working again because we fixed it on our end.”
For many people this has indeed worked. This user on X were successful after restarting their computers several times. Microsoft also said that they have received feedback that several reboots (as many as 15) have been effective.
However, if you still have problems even after rebooting, CrowdStrike recommends boot into safe mode and then delete the corrupted file. Here’s what the company describes on CrowdStrike’s website:
- Boot your Windows computer into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment.
- Navigate to the %WINDIR%\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike folder.
- Find the file named “C-00000291*.sys” and delete it.
- Boot the host normally.
Remark: Hosts encrypted with Bitlocker may require a recovery key.
If you are dealing with a public cloud or other virtual environment, there is another solution that CrowdStrike recommends that you can use View on the website.
