Microsoft Windows outage: Indian government issues ‘critical’ advisory to help users solve the CrowdStrike problem

Windows Outage: The Indian Government's CERT-In, in response to the severity of the ongoing outage impacting millions of Microsoft Windows users worldwide, has issued a ‘critical’ advisory. The advisory outlines the issues with Microsoft Azure and their impact on the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor, which is causing PCs to restart and display the ‘Blue Screen of Death’. The organisation, known for its frequent reports on vulnerabilities, has provided a list of workarounds that users can resort to.

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CERT-In Lists Workarounds to Address Windows Outage Issues

CERT-In notes that issues in the latest update of CrowdStrike have been “reverted” by the CrowdStrike team. Meanwhile, the organisation has listed several ways users can stay online to receive Channel File Changes:

• Users should try booting their Windows in Safe Mode or Windows Recovery Environment.
• Secondly, users should navigate to their C Drive > Windows > System32 > Drivers > CrowdStrike directory, and then locate the file ‘C-00000291.sys’ and delete it.
• Afterwards, users should reboot their host normally, according to CERT-In.

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CERT-In: Keep Looking for Updates

If you have been dealing with this issue, CERT-In advises users to keep checking for new updates from the CrowdStrike portal. This is advisable as new updates are likely to resolve the issues stemming from Microsoft’s end.

Microsoft has also stated that it is working to resolve the issues affecting both Microsoft Azure and the Office 365 suite of apps and services.

Microsoft Windows Outage: Why Is The Issue Happening?

CrowdStrike has acknowleged the issue, and has released a fix. “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on X.

Microsoft has officially acknowledged the issue, and has said that it is a result of a “configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads.” This directly caused an “interruption between storage and compute resources, which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.” This ended up impacting the CrowdStrike Falcon agents, and ultimately causes the PCs to restart, and show the ‘Blue Screen of Death’.