News Highlights:
- A CrowdStrike code update has bricked Windows machines worldwide affecting numerous companies.
- The Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) is appearing on affected Windows machines, causing outages for companies.
- CrowdStrike identified the issue but affected computers still require manual intervention to delete the update and restart.
There are trending reports that a CrowdStrike code update that took place Thursday night (July 18) is bricking Windows machines across the world, impacting companies of all scales.
In the United Kingdom, the London Stock Exchange, television companies, flight operators and train companies are impacted.
The dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) is appearing on Windows machines across the world as this is believed to be a recent CrowdStrike update with an alleged screenshot appearing on X (formerly Twitter) seemingly confirming the issue.
Tracking website Down Detector registered outages and problems at a huge array of companies: Delta Airlines, Visa, Mastercard, Lloyds Bank, Santander, Amazon, RyanAir, Sky News, Ladbrokes, BT, and Microsoft Teams all show issues.
Delta, United and American Airlines were all grounded in the US, according to the Federal Aviation Authority. Around the world, flights and train operators were hit by problems.
Govia Thameslink Railway – the UK’s busiest train operator, which runs the Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express and Great Northern services around London – said that it was experiencing “widespread IT issues”.
RyanAir said it was a “global third-party IT outage” and advised travellers to arrive “at least three hours before” their flights.
The trouble appears to relate to an issue at Crowdstrike, a cyber security company, which may have released a problem update.
It said early in the morning that it had identified the issue and rolled the update back – but those computers that were already affected do not appear to have been fixed.
On the company’s Reddit thread, representatives advised that the problem could be fixed by deleting the update and then restarting the computer.
That requires administrators to have access to the computer, however, which may not be immediately possible for those that are being used remotely.