Tag Archive for: windows

Crowdstrike outage: What happened?

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Crowdstrike update 291

I must have started this post about the Crowdstrike outage a dozen times, trying to strike a decent balance between being easily digestible and technically accurate.

Then Dave Palmer, former Microsoft developer, posted this video on Youtube. It is very accurate and explains what happened, and why it happened, in a reasonably easy to follow way.

I highly recommend watching it.

Crowdstrike outage TL;DR

Crowdstrike pushed out a bad update (number 291). This update caused machines to bugcheck or BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). Because their product is considered a boot-start driver, it could not be bypassed on boot, leaving machines in an endless boot, BSOD, reboot state. While errors like this are bound to happen, the fact that there was no error handling in the driver is 100% Crowdstrike’s failure.

This has all happened before

And it will happen again… so long as CEO George Kurtz keeps failing up. There seems to be a pattern with the CEO of Crowdstrike.  He used to be the CTO of McAfee, who had a similar issue back in 2010 when they released an update that quarantined a Windows system file which caused millions of computers to crash.

Twice is, you know, a pattern.

Recovery

Recovery is fairly simple, assuming you can access the machine. Crowdstrike has issued the following guidance on recovering crashed systems, and Microsoft has created a tool you can download to aid in recovery.

Update 291’d

I predict that this will be a thing in years to come. Whenever a software or security vendor borks a substantial number of machines they’ll say “they update 291’d them”. On second thought, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

If you need help with a BSOD problem, contact me to schedule an appointment.

Windows screen black? Try this first.

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The dreaded Windows Black Screen

Have you ever sat down to work only to find your Windows screen is black? The PC is powered on but doesn’t display anything on the monitor. You see lights on the computer case, probably hear fans running from inside, and may even hear sounds, you try pressing a key or two, clicking your mouse, but nothing at all shows up on your screen.

Before you try anything else, try pressing:

Windows Logo Key+CTRL+SHIFT+B fixes Windows screen black or blank

This combination (WIN+CTRL+SHIFT+B) wakes your screen from its, let’s call it “stupor”, and gets you back to work, assuming a larger issue is not at hand. What it really does is restart your graphics driver. More accurately, it forces the Windows “Desktop Window Manager” to recreate its graphics context, but let’s not pick the nit out of this.

I suppose you could just power your machine off and then back on and that would work, too. But you run the risk of file corruption doing that.

Bonus keyboard shortcut

This was a pretty short post and I felt a little bad about that, so here’s another shortcut for you.

Want to quickly hide all the open programs on your desktop? Try WIN+D. Press it again to restore all those programs.

Interested in more Windows keyboard shortcuts? See a comprehensive list here.

Still having Windows black screen problems? Contact me and schedule an appointment.