Global IT Outage Disrupts Major Banks, Airlines, and Businesses Worldwide
It was a quiet Friday that many people were looking forward to. The weekend was approaching, the summer was here, but as everybody tried to log in into their workstations, it was clear something was wrong.
At first, many companies noticed that some services were unavailable, prompting internal teams to have a look over the systems and networks. However, it was soon clear that many of the systems were not booting up, thus putting a halt into the operations of every system.
Currently, it’s reported that:
- Major disruption to several Microsoft services
- 911 services interrupted in multiple US states
- Operations at the London Stock Exchange affected
- Sky News broadcasting halted
The issue
The issue was quickly traced to a Crowdstrike update that was automatically pushed via the auto-update process. After the update and a system restart, all Windows machines experienced a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).
A Reddit thread and multiple other platforms and forums were soon overloaded with users complaining about this issue.
Forums report that Crowdstrike has issued an advisory with a URL containing "Tech-Alert-Windows-crashes-related-to-Falcon-Sensor-2024-07-19." However, this advisory is behind a registration wall and only accessible to customers.
The Workaround
If you’ve restarted your device, there is no other way to fix the problem either than to follow the next steps:
- Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment
- Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory
- Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.
- Boot the host normally.
If the above steps are taken, Crowdstrike will still be in function but it will stop communicating to CrowdStrike (the company site), meaning any other new policies would not be updated. Unfortunately you will have to push the fix manually afterwards or reinstall Crowdstrike.
The fix
Crowdstrike is currently working on a fix which apparently has been tested, but not yet pushed as a global rollout.
Written by
Alex Marin
Application Packaging and SCCM Deployments specialist, solutions finder, Technical Writer at Advanced Installer.