CrowdStrike Update Disables Windows PCs Around the World

A Crowdstrike update has broken computers running across the world, causing them to crash and display what's commonly referred to as the "blue screen of death."

The crashes have affected hundreds of companies and caused several institutions to climb to a crawl. The crash has impacted banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, supermarkets and thousands of businesses around the world. The damage appears to be due to a faulty update introduced by CrowdStrike that knocked several PCs out of commission.

CrowdStrike's George Kurtz

"CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts," Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz posted on Twitter/X. "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. We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers."

Several IT admins discussed workarounds for getting to the problem area in a Reddit thread. This includes booting affected Windows machines into safety mode, navigating to the CrowdStrike directory and deleting certain files. While this may work for certain local machines, cloud-based servers may find this a struggle.

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While CrowdStrike claims the issue has been identified, IT admins may struggle to implement the fix. The root cause is an update to the kernel-level driver that CrowdStrike uses to secure Windows machines.