Many Microsoft Windows 10 computers are glitching across the world, leaving hundreds of thousands of people impacting. On social media, people are posting photos of their computer screens after their systems have suffered BSOD with the classic blue screen on the display. The glitch has apparently impacted not just people who are currently at work in many offices around the world, but also in critical places like airports where services have been impacted. It has been reported that the glitch is likely a result of an update issued by CrowdStrike.
Users on social media have been posting screens showing a Recovery Page with a message on it, which reads “The windows did not load correctly”. Popular airline companies in India, including Akasa Air and Indigo have suffered issues with their check-in systems due to the crowdstrike update, which has reportedly caused the outage. Microsoft is yet to react to the matter.
CrowdStrike has acknowledged the issue in a support note to its customers. The company has said, “We have widespread reports of BSODs on Windows hosts, occurring on multiple sensor versions.” It hasn’t yet specified anything else.
Ryan Air, an airline in Europe, has said that there is “potential disruptions across the network (Fri 19 July) due to a global 3rd party system outage.” The company wrote on its website, “We regret any inconvenience caused to passengers by this 3rd party IT issue, which is outside of Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network.”
Akasa Air in India has also issued an update on its services that have been impacted due to BSOD caused by CrowdStrike update. The website wrote on X, “Due to infrastructure issues with our service provider, some of our online services, including booking, check-in and manage booking services will be temporarily unavailable. Currently we are following manual check-in and boarding processes at the airports and hence.”
According to a report by Guardian Australia — likely among the first ones to report the glitch because offices in Australia opened ahead of others — the glitch has impacted “businesses including banks, airlines, telecommunications companies, TV and radio broadcasters, and supermarkets” that “have been taken offline after blue screen of death error screens were seen on Windows workstations across the globe.”
While currently it is not clear what the issue is, the preliminary information suggests that the Windows BSOD is because of an update issued by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company based in the US. The update is reportedly part of the Falcon suite of software, which manages cybersecurity defence in computers. This is likely the reason why not all Windows 10 computers have been impacted, but just those that have Falcon running on them. A cybersecurity expert on Twitter noted, “CrowdStrike Falcon agents are imploding right now and causing a Blue Screen of Death boot loop on every endpoint. Reports of massive outages globally.”
While IT teams, particularly in critical places like airports, hospitals and government offices, are scrambling to respond to the Windows 10 CrowdStrike BSOD, some people — particularly office employees — saw silverlining in their blue computers. It’s an early weekend, they are tweeting. “CrowdStrike declaring an early weekend by taking out half the world’s systems. Even ransomware isn’t this effective,” wrote Gabriel, an X user.