By now you’ve probably heard of the CrowdStrike outage. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid any personal headaches from this widespread incident, you surely know someone who was affected.
The good news? Microsoft has released a recovery tool to help IT workers get around the PC crashes that resulted from the CrowdStrike update, hopefully alleviating recovery times.
Quick context: CrowdStrike is a US cybersecurity software supplier that sells security infrastructure to huge corporations. While you probably don’t work with CrowdStrike’s software directly, there’s a good chance it’s humming away somewhere within the systems of the company you work for.
Last Friday, CrowdStrike pushed a faulty software update that caused Windows machines all over the world to crash and get stuck in an infinite reboot loop. This brought entire industries to a sudden and catastrophic halt, including international airlines, banking, and even hospitals.
The actual CrowdStrike bug was patched soon after it first occurred, but affected computers need to be manually restored. With over 8 million Windows computers impacted, the recovery is tedious, to say the least.
Microsoft is working around that with a downloadable tool that can be loaded onto a bootable USB flash drive, the same sort of tool you’ve probably used to install a fresh copy of Windows. IT managers should be able to download and install the tool using any Windows machine that’s currently still working.
The Verge reports that this recovery tool should be able to patch Windows so it can boot without restarting the PC fifteen times. (Yes, that was a proposed solution at one point.)
The immediate fallout of the CrowdStrike disaster seems to be contained, but it’ll certainly be a black eye on the company’s reputation for the foreseeable future. CrowdStrike’s publicly traded stock price went from over $350 last week to $267 at the time of this writing Monday morning, blowing away tens of billions of dollars in value.
And it sure isn’t doing Microsoft any favors, either. It’s hard not to associate the CrowdStrike issue with Windows when it resulted in the return of the infamous Blue Screen of Death.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.