(Credit: Troy Hunt/X)
UPDATE 7/23: CrowdStrike has published a how-to video on helping affected users restore their Windows PCs from the outage.
Original story:
If you woke up Friday morning to a Blue Screen of Death on your Windows PC, you're not alone. A software bug from antivirus provider CrowdStrike has bricked countless Windows machines.
The good news is there’s a fix, but it requires a few steps. CrowdStrike isolated the error to a faulty update that it rolled out to Windows systems, including servers. On the positive side, this means the problem can be fixed by simply deleting a single file in the CrowdStrike software.
The obvious challenge is that affected Windows PCs are automatically booting up into the error state, preventing people from making any file changes. But there is a workaround: In a support document, CrowdStrike says affected customers should boot their Windows PC into Safe Mode, a Microsoft process specifically designed to help the user troubleshoot their computer.
You should be able to enter the Safe Mode through the Blue Screen of Death via the advanced repair options button if it's already in the Recovery environment. Another way is to restart the PC, and hold the F8 key before the system reaches the Windows screen. In either case, you should see a blue screen that lets you troubleshoot. You’ll then need to navigate to "Advanced options" and pick the entry that lets you boot up in several different safe modes.
(Credit: Michael Kan/PCMag)CrowdStrike says you should select the Safe Mode with Networking option. Your PC should then restart without triggering the Blue Screen of Death error. Instead, the Windows OS will return while using only a limited set of files, preventing the faulty CrowdStrike bug from running.
Using File Explorer, users should then navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory, and locate and delete a file called C-00000291*.sys. Restart your computer and it should be free of the problem for good.
If this fix is too difficult, there’s also another workaround. Microsoft and CrowdStrike are indicating that rebooting the Windows system multiple times can also fix the problem. That’s because CrowdStrike has deployed a fix, which can sometimes successfully roll out to a Windows system during the start-up stages.
Despite the fixes, cybersecurity experts fear many users and IT admins will need to manually repair the problem, whether it be through constant reboots or going into safe mode and deleting the affected file. As a result, it could take days or weeks to fix the issue.