All our servers and company laptops went down at pretty much the same time. Laptops have been bootlooping to blue screen of death. It’s all very exciting, personally, as someone not responsible for fixing it.
Apparently caused by a bad CrowdStrike update.
Edit: now being told we (who almost all generally work from home) need to come into the office Monday as they can only apply the fix in-person. We’ll see if that changes over the weekend…
If these affected systems are boot looping, how will they be fixed? Reinstall?
There is a fix people have found which requires manual booting into safe mode and removal of a file causing the BSODs. No clue if/how they are going to implement a fix remotely when the affected machines can’t even boot.
Probably have to go old-skool and actually be at the machine.
And hope you are not using BitLocker cause then you are screwed since BitLocker is tied to CS.
You just need console access. Which if any of the affected servers are VMs, you’ll have.
Yes, VMs will be more manageable.
Exactly, and super fun when all your systems are remote!!!
It’s not super awful as long as everything is virtual. It’s annoying, but not painful like it would be for physical systems.
Really don’t envy physical/desk side support folks today…
Do you have any source on this?
If you have an account you can view the support thread here: https://supportportal.crowdstrike.com/s/article/Tech-Alert-Windows-crashes-related-to-Falcon-Sensor-2024-07-19
Workaround Steps:
Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment
Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory
Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.
Boot the host normally.
I can confirm it works after applying it to >100 servers :/
Nice work, friend. 🤝 [back pat]
It seems like it’s in like half of the news stories.
It is possible to edit a folder name in windows drivers. But for IT departments that could be more work than a reimage
Having had to fix >100 machines today, I’m not sure how a reimage would be less work. Restoring from backups maybe, but reimage and reconfig is so painful
Yes, but there are less competent people. The main answer for any slightly complex issue at work is ‘reimage’ - the pancea to solve all problems. And reconfig of personal settings is the users problem.
It’s just one file to delete.