'Blue screen of death' | Managing disruption caused by the global CrowdStrike IT outage

A global IT outage had caused massive disruption across multiple industries, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off-air and everything from banking to healthcare hit by system problems.

According to an alert sent to clients by American cybersecurity technology firm CrowdStrike, the company’s “Falcon Sensor” software caused Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death”.

The alert, which was sent at 05:30AM GMT on Friday July 19th, also shared a manual workaround to rectify the issue.

CrowdStrike president George Kurtz said the problem was caused by a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts”.