The world is slowly recovering from what many consider the Y2K bug that arrived with an over two decades delay. If you missed it, CrowdStrike, a company providing cybersecurity solutions, issued a faulty update for one of its agents (CrowdStrike Falcon), which essentially took down thousands of PCs worldwide, resulting in banks, TV broadcasters, airlines, and many other companies halting their operations due to their Windows PCs crashing to blue screens of death (BSOD) or Windows Recovery.
Although Microsoft is not the one to blame for the outage, the company is doing everything possible to restore the affected systems. It works with CrowdStrike to resolve the issue, and customers can already check out detailed step-by-step guides on how to recover from blue screens of death with error codes 0x50 or 0x7E (also check out the official guide suggested by CrowdStrike).
Microsoft has identified an issue impacting Windows endpoints that are running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent. These endpoints might encounter error messages 0x50 or 0x7E on a blue screen and experience a continual restarting state.
We have received reports of successful recovery from some customers attempting multiple restart operations on affected Windows endpoints.
We are working with CrowdStrike to provide the most up-to-date information available on this issue. Please check back for updates on this ongoing issue.
The guides are available on the KB5042421 support page. They offer detailed explanations of fixing different scenarios using different methods on Windows 10 and 11. Systems affected by the outage crash to blue screens of death or Windows Recovery, and Microsoft has guides for both scenarios. You can restore using Safe Mode or a System Restore Point.
The official Windows Health Dashboard website says Microsoft will provide more updates and relevant information as they become available. Therefore, expect to hear more about what seems to be the largest IT outage in recent memory.