Blue screen of death outage affected around 8.5 million devices

A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike caused a global outage last Friday, apparently affecting some 8.5 million Windows devices, according to Microsoft itself.

The update triggered a blue screen of death (BSOD), knocking offline systems used by hospitals, airlines, and banks. Only machines running Windows were affected — according to CrowdStrike, the total number of devices affected was “less than one percent of all Windows machines.”

The update “was designed to target newly observed, malicious named pipes being used by common C2 frameworks in cyberattacks,” according to CrowdStrike. Unfortunately, it included a logic error, crashing the OS. In the blog post on Saturday, Microsoft’s VP of enterprise and OS security, David Weston, wrote that the company is working with CrowdStrike to “develop a scalable solution” to fix the faulty update. Microsoft has also called for help from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Unfortunately, not everything is fixed quite yet — just ask Delta flyers over the weekend.

— Mat Smith

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