Your IT Team May Need Your Assistance to Resolve the CrowdStrike Outage
Businesses worldwide faced a harsh reality today as their Windows machines displayed the dreaded “blue screen of death” error. This issue, unrelated to cyberattacks or hardware failures, stemmed from a faulty update released by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
The situation is compounded by the fact that the fixes available require individual attention, leading to a challenging day for IT departments. If you’re currently dealing with the blue screen on your business’s Windows machines or your own company-issued device, here’s what’s being done to address the problem.
How to Fix CrowdStrike’s Blue Screen of Death on Your PC
CrowdStrike has rolled back the problematic update, but many machines are locking up before they can receive this fix. Two primary workarounds are circulating among IT professionals:
- Reboot Repeatedly: The simplest and oldest IT trick—turning the device off and on again—has been reported to work in some cases. Rebooting may allow your PC to contact CrowdStrike’s servers before it locks up. However, given the volume of requests CrowdStrike’s servers are handling, there’s no guarantee this will work swiftly.
- Manual Fix: This method is more reliable but requires more effort and physical access to each device:
- Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment.
- Navigate to the CrowdStrike directory, typically located at
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike. - Delete the file named “C-00000291*sys”.
- Reboot the computer.
This approach removes the problematic file but comes with its own challenges. Accessing Safe Mode or the recovery environment generally requires physical access to the device, complicating mass updates. Additionally, users may need admin rights to delete the file and, if BitLocker disk encryption is enabled, must obtain a recovery key from their Microsoft account—a hurdle for users without access to this information.
If you’re not part of the IT department, stay alert for any instructions they might send out. Your tech-savvy colleagues may need your assistance to get your PC up and running.
CrowdStrike is actively managing the situation, with CEO George Kurtz acknowledging in an NBC News interview that, “It could be some time for some systems that won’t automatically recover, but it is our mission to make sure every customer is fully recovered.”
