A massive Microsoft Windows outage has left millions of computers experiencing Blue Screen of Death errors, as well as worldwide communications issues.
The blackout has pulled Sky News of the air, as well as grounded flights for airlines around the world.
MicrosoftThe blue screen essentially forces laptops and computers to suddenly shut down and restart[/caption]
Microsoft and CrowdStrike engineers are currently working to resolve the issue
Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, has reported a sharp spike in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking sites and airline apps.
Users have reported problems across the UK, Germany, US, Australia, New Zealand, India and Japan.
“It happened to me on my work machine and multiple people at work reported the same thing,” one affected user wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Another user added: “It started yesterday evening… right now it’s on a very large scale.”
Check out The Sun’s live blog for the latest on the current Microsoft outages.
What is causing it?
So-called Blue Screen of Death errors (BSOD) have appeared on laptop and computer screens following a recent CrowdStrike cybersecurity update, according to reports.
“We’re aware of a widespread issue causing BSOD errors on Windows machines across various sensor versions,” a CrowdStrike spokesperson said in a help forum on its website.
The blue screen essentially forces laptops and computers to suddenly shut down and restart.
However, users say they are getting the screen several times back to back, shutting them out of their PC completely.
Microsoft and CrowdStrike engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.
In a statement on X, Microsoft 356 said it is “investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services”.
It added: “We’re working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expediate fashion.”
The outage appears to relate to CrowdStrike’s Falcon cloud cybersecurity service.
Toby Murray, an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne, said it is possible that today’s outage may have been caused by a buggy update to Falcon.
He explained: “CrowdStrike Falcon has been linked to this widespread outage.
“Falcon is what is known as an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) platform, which monitors the computers that it is installed on to detect intrusions (i.e., hacks) and respond to them.
“That means that Falcon is a pretty privileged piece of software in that it is able to influence how the computers it is installed on behave.
“If Falcon is suffering a malfunction then it could be causing a widespread outage for two reasons: 1 – Falcon is widely deployed on many computers, and 2 – Because of Falcon’s privileged nature.”
‘Too early’ for conclusions
Although the root cause may also lie at Microsoft, or even Amazon Authorities, according to Cybersecurity Professor, Jill Slay, of the University of South Australia (UniSA).
For now, it is “too early” to draw concrete conclusions.
“There is currently a major global technical outage affecting multiple companies and services,” she said.
“Some are attributing this to security services offered by CrowdStrike.
“Others attribute it to Microsoft or Amazon Authorities and industry will be monitoring, but at this stage it is too early to draw conclusions.”
Despite the outage currently being associated with cybersecurity software, it is “unlikely” to have been caused by a widescale security breach.
Slay continued: “While the outage may easily be a result of misconfiguration by one of these companies, or ‘interference’ between products, the global impact is enormous.
“It is possible that there is a security breach, but to me, this is instinctively unlikely.”
This is a breaking news story.
