Microsoft Windows’ users were hit by a bug caused by a security update early today, resulting in the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
The bug originated with CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company which is mostly used by corporations to secure their networks.
This affected thousands of computers, making them go into an unrecoverable boot loop, causing disruptions to airports and airlines, banking, emergency call centers, and even hospitals.
You can see flights grounded on realtime from this post on X.
Even now, I still can’t place any trades on Schwab’s platform.
More critically, many point-of-sales systems were down, making it impossible to use credit cards to purchase anything. Keeping some cash on hand during grid outages is important.
This is part of the problem with extremely interconnected devices that rely on outside networks. When a critical cog stops working, there can be cascading effects.
How to Fix a Computer Affected by the CrowdStrike Update
MIT’s technology review has published a manual method to fix PCs affected by the faulty CrowdStrike update.
It’s simple, but requires somebody to physically boot the machine into safe mode or the Windows Recovery Environment.
Stay prepared by using apps that work offline.
