Microsoft Global Outage: How to Fix Blue Screen of Death. CERT-In Suggests Steps

New Delhi, India: After a major outage in microsoft’s cloud services on Friday hit business across the world, from airlines and financial services to media groups and healthcare, the CrowdStrike team reverted the changes made in the recent update to mitigate these issues. However, hosts are still experiencing crashes and are unable to stay online to receive the necessary channel file changes. CERT-In recommended certain steps that can be used as work around for this issue.  

Microsoft Outage: Workaround Steps To Resolve the Issue

1. Boot Windows in Safe Mode or Windows Recovery Environment.
2. Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory.
3. Delete the file matching "C-00000291*.sys".
4. Reboot the system normally.

What Microsoft Said After Global Outage?

In a thread of posts on the social media platform ‘X’, Microsoft has said, “We're investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services. More info posted in the admin center under MO821132 and on https://msft.it/6019lRURc."

“We're working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion. More info is posted in the admin center under MO821132 and on http://status.cloud.microsoft.”

“We remain focused on redirecting the impacted traffic to healthy systems. We still expect that users will continue to see gradual relief as we continue to mitigate the issue."

“We still expect that users will continue to see gradual relief as we continue to mitigate the issue.”

Crowdstrike CEO on Microsoft outage

George Kurtz, the CEO of Crowdstrike, said, "Crowdstrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.

He added, “We further recommend organisations ensure they’re communicating with Crowdstrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilised to ensure the security and stability of Crowdstrike customers.”

What is the blue screen of death?

The blue screen of death appears on Windows devices when the operating system encounters a critical error, prompting an unexpected shutdown or restart. Typically, it features white text on a blue background, informing users that Windows has halted to prevent potential damage. During Friday’s outage, affected users saw a message stating Windows failed to load correctly, with options to restart the system or troubleshoot using advanced repair tools.

Interestingly, the original text displayed on the first Windows blue screen was reportedly penned by Microsoft cofounder Steve Ballmer. Blue screens can be caused by a range of hardware and software issues. They occur when the operating system invokes the KeBugCheck API as a last resort, akin to a fire alarm, to prevent further potential harm, halting the system prematurely. Importantly, blue screens typically occur without data loss, though ongoing work may not be recoverable.