The Microsoft outage, caused by cyber security firm CrowdStrike, has disrupted travellers around the world – sparking widespread chaos in airports and forcing us back to the ‘Stone Age’
A global IT outage affecting Windows devices has forced us back to our pre-tech era.
Chaos rapidly unravelled after banks, ATMs, airlines, broadcasters, and even GPs, were all kicked offline – helplessly trapped in a ‘blue screen of death’ loop. Calls for an emergency COBRA meeting swiftly followed, after passengers were left stranded in major airports and train stations across the nation. Crowd Strike has ruled out a cyber attack, blaming the outage on a corrupted file.
Sky News was one of many companies affected by the glitch, which has been described as of the biggest IT meltdown of all time. Brits also struggled to access doctor appointments and their medical records, while train station ticket machine went down and sparked delays.
Akshay Kothali was affected by the chaos, as he arrived at Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport this morning. The passenger was left baffled after receiving a hand-written boarding pass by IndiGo airline – after the company’s system abruptly stopped working.
The post has amassed a whopping 2.6 million views and thousands of likes, as one person sensationally declared: “We are going back to the stone age.” Another agreed, commenting: Wow. That’s gone at least 20 years backwards in just one hour,” while a third added: “That’s insane.”
Many social media users were quick to highlight how dependant we’ve become on technology, and argued that sometimes ‘the old-school way’ is more reliable. “Sometimes you have just got to rely on people, not machine,” one person said. Another penne: “Back to basics.”
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Crowd Strike, which provides security protection for cloud software including the Microsoft 365 platform, says the issue has now been identified and a ‘fix has been deployed’. The company’s President George Kurtz stated they’re ‘actively’ working with customers impacted by the defect and clarified Max and Linux hosts haven’t been affected.
He added: “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 organisations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.”
How to get rid of blue screen of death
If your Windows device is still experiencing issues from the glitch, you can try the following steps:
- Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment
- • Navigate to the C:WindowsSystem32driversCrowdStrike directory
- Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.
- Boot the host normally.
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