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A ‘significant’ amount of the 8.5 million PCs affected by CrowdStrike outage are fixed

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The Blue Screen of Death seen on a laptop.
Maxim Tolchinskiy / Unsplash

After a faulty update on CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform caused a massive outage that left various industries at a standstill last Friday, Microsoft and CrowdStrike finally detailed solutions that fix the issues.

In an X (formerly Twitter) post, CrowdStrike stated that it continues to focus on restoring all systems as soon as possible and that a “significant” number of affected PCs are now back online and operational. In addition, CrowdStrike claims that it’s testing a new technique to speed up the impacted PCs. However, CrowdStrike also recently warned users that scammers are taking advantage of the outage too, adding one more wrinkle to the disaster.

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All that is mostly good news — and yet, as of this morning, some major companies have struggled to recover, such as Delta Airlines. Airlines were hit hardest by the outage, with Southwest being the only exception due to its use of a very old version of Windows. But Delta has continued to suffer problems, even days after the initial outage, leaving many people stranded at airports since Friday.

On Saturday, Microsoft announced a way to roll back the driver in a blog post. CrowdStrike, on the other hand, has also released a new “Remediation and Guidance Hub” that gives more information on the outage that caused 8.5 million PCs to crash.

To get the fix going, Microsoft says that systems will need to meet some prerequisites, but also offers a set of step-by-step instructions on how to use the Recovery Tool. PCs will need admin privileges, 8GB of free space, a BitLocker key for PCs using the encryption (a 48-digit numerical key that may be required to be entered multiple times), and a USB boot drive with a minimum capacity of 1GB. The instructions also guide users on how to enter Safe Mode and download and prepare the thumb drive.

CrowdStrike’s post, on the other hand, guides users to a YouTube video outlining steps to self-remediate the affected PCs. The video shows how to reboot into Safe Mode and remove the problematic file. The post also includes links to different third-party vendor pages on how to deal with the outage and words from the company’s CEO, George Kurtz, apologizing for the outage.

“I want to sincerely apologize directly to all of you for the outage,” Kurtz said. “All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation. We quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, allowing us to focus diligently on restoring customer systems as our highest priority.

The outage was caused by a defect found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This was not a cyberattack.

We are working closely with impacted customers and partners to ensure that all systems are restored, so you can deliver the services your customers rely on.”

This nightmare scenario is far from over, and the ramifications are still unknown, but things appear to at least be heading in the right direction.

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Judy Sanhz
Judy Sanhz
Computing Writer
Judy Sanhz is a Digital Trends computing writer covering all computing news. Loves all operating systems and devices.
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