Microsoft Users across the world are facing an error screen known as the “Blue Screen of Death,” amid widespread and ongoing technical outages.
The US tech giant was hit by an update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that led to a major IT outage. Several other companies were also affected.
“We are aware of an issue with Windows 365 Cloud PCs caused by a recent update to CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor,” Microsoft said on its 365 Status X account.
It advised affected users to “restore their Windows 365 Cloud PCs to a known good state before the update was released (July 19, 2024)” and referred them to some online guidance.
In a separate update, Microsoft said users may encounter an error check — known as a BSOD, or blue screen of death — and “get stuck in a reboot state.”
“We have received reports of successful recoveries from some customers who attempted multiple reboots of affected virtual machines,” the company said.
“CrowdStrike has pulled the affected update. Customers who are still experiencing issues should contact CrowdStrike for additional assistance.”
CrowdStrike CEO said in a statement on X that the company is “actively working with customers affected by a flaw found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not affected.”
“This is not a security incident or cyber attack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” George Kurtz added.
Earlier, Microsoft said its cloud services were back up and running after an outage that affected Azure services and the Microsoft 365 suite of applications in the central U.S. A company spokesperson told Dow Jones that there were two separate, unrelated issues: one involving Azure and the other involving CrowdStrike.
Microsoft shares fell more than 1% in premarket trading, off their previous lows.
