BSOD error in Crowdstrike update takes out the internet

Many people woke up this morning (or last night) depending on where you are in the world to blue-tint filled screens as they attempted to boot up their Windows machines to get the work day started.

While normally many people would shun it off and assume that IT has it covered, this time around things seemed a bit more complex. Particularly as this issue seems to have far reaching effects in everything from the banking and financial sector to international travel as many airports worldwide were forced to shut down flights temporarily until the issue was resolved.

Though initially it seemed like Microsoft was getting the blame tossed their direction, which logically makes sense as the "blue-screen of death" is essentially a part of their brand these days with the iconic sad face emoticon, the culprit was actually a broken deployment by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

A post on Reddit, seemingly from a moderator at the company has both confirmed the issue and offered a temporary solution as well.

Source: Reddit

CrowdStrike is a US cybersecurity company with a large market share worldwide. Their EDR (endpoint detection and response) software Falcon is used by many organizations in order to secure their infrastructure.

From the sounds of it so far, this issue does not effect Mac and Linux users, as the company CEO George Kurtz took to X to clarify the situation.

Source: X

From what we can gather so far, the issue was caused by a broken deployment to the Falcon Sensor product that forced Windows PC's into an unrecoverable boot loop, and thus, the blue screen of death scenario.

So while the fix has been reverted and a patch deployed, it will probably take some time for this solution to spread across the globe to all of its customers.

In the meantime though, it seems like some services are still continuing to be affected. Taking a look at DownDetector this morning, it seems like while some companies and services have begun to recover, others are just starting their temporary decent.

Source: DownDetector.com

Some are calling this the "largest" internet outage in our modern time, and while I agree that it's definitely not the smallest by any means, the fact that a solution was found relatively quickly and that some companies have begun to implement patches and are up and running once again makes this a lukewarm outage, at least to me.

As with most things, once the dust settles and more and more companies come back online, we'll get a much better idea as to the damage that was done in its totality.

And if anything, it should definitely make developers out there just a bit more cautious when they push that build out to their continuously deployed server in the future.