The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued an advisory, CIAD-2024-0035, addressing a severe outage impacting Microsoft Windows systems.
New Delhi: In a surprising worldwide development, US tech giant Microsoft experienced a significant outage on Friday, impacting its services for users across many countries including India, the US, Japan, and Australia. According to crowd-sourced website Downdetector, users are experiencing outages across Skype, Office 265, Bing, Azure, Teams, and Xbox. Users are seeing blue screen of death (BSOD) errors which reportedly are due to a Crowdstrike application update.
“We have widespread reports of BSODs on Windows hosts, occurring on multiple sensor versions. Investigating the cause. Technical alert (TA) will be published shortly,” according to a pinned thread on Reddit. Microsoft said it is “observing a positive trend in service availability as it continues to mitigate the problem”, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Guardian reported that ABC news and banking apps, and airlines in Australia were hit by network outages linked to Microsoft.
What Is CrowdStrike?
CrowdStrike is a digital security solution, offering protective services to individuals and businesses alike. Making use of an integrated threat interface and a singular sensor, its feature, Falcon Identity Threat Protection helps avert identity-related violations as they happen. Despite its efficiency, it has been noted there were some hiccups with an update that reportedly interfered with the Falcon Sensor’s compatibility with the Windows operating system.
What Is Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)?
The Blue Screen of Death, also known as the BSOD, is quite a nasty surprise that pops up on Windows Operating System when something goes seriously wrong. These mishaps can cause your computer to restart out of the blue, possibly causing any unsaved work to disappear. What you’ll typically see in this case is an error message saying something to the effect of, “Oops, your PC just ran into a problem and has to restart. We’re just gathering some error info, then we’ll restart for you.”
CERT-In Advisory
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued an advisory, CIAD-2024-0035, addressing a severe outage impacting Microsoft Windows systems. According to CERT, this disruption is linked to the recent update of the CrowdStrike agent, Falcon Sensor, which has caused affected systems to experience crashes and the notorious “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD).
Recent reports have indicated that Windows hosts equipped with the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor are encountering stability issues due to the latest update of the product. This update has led to widespread outages and system crashes, rendering many Windows hosts inoperable and displaying the BSOD.
(With inputs from agencies)