What is the ‘blue screen’ error that paralyzes a series of airports?

The global Windows computer crash has brought back memories of the “blue screen of death” (BSOD) error, which has haunted Windows users for decades.

Although inconvenient, this is a safety measure to prevent more serious damage in incidents and not damage the data in the machine. Photo: Alamy.

Windows computers all over the world are experiencing problems. A series of devices fail to boot and instead display a “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD). The scale affected many important industries such as banking, aviation, and telecommunications on July 19.

Airlines like American Airlines have problems with bookings, check-in, and other functions. The incident forced the airline to land flights and left passengers stranded. Frontier Airlines attributed the outage to a “Microsoft technical issue,” while Allegiant claimed that “its website is currently unavailable due to a Microsoft Azure issue.

In fact, this blue screen error is caused by CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor software having a problem and is spreading at an unpredictable scale. But what is CrowdStrike? What is a “blue screen of death”? If you’re using a Windows computer, should you be worried?

What is a blue screen of death?

According to Microsoft’s official blog post, the blue screen error occurs when there is a serious problem, to the point that the device cannot continue to function properly. This error causes Windows to shut down or restart immediately, so unsaved data will most likely be lost.

If your computer is running Windows 7 or earlier, the BSOD error screen usually displays a snippet of code with technical information, providing clues about the problem. Users can search for this line of code including both letters and numbers on the Internet to find a way to fix it.

However, with Windows 8 onwards, Microsoft has simplified the screen and displayed a sad emoji with a QR code, so that users can scan it for more information about the error.

Although inconvenient, this is a safety measure to prevent more serious damage in incidents and not damage the data in the machine. When the system encounters a BSOD error, the device stops all operations to prevent potential hardware damage and creates a memory dump file.

This file contains information about the system status at the time of the problem and can be used to troubleshoot the problem. After the memory dump is saved, the system needs to be rebooted.

The blue screen issue appears across devices using Microsoft services. Photo: Story Picture Agency.

After restarting the device, Windows will start the automatic troubleshooting and repair process. If the operating system is unable to resolve the issue, the system needs to be manually fixed such as restoring recent driver updates, checking for BIOS updates, or running hardware diagnostics.

The cause comes from an antivirus software

According to Times Nows New, the blue screen of death issue can be caused by a hardware or software conflict, corrupted files, or faulty drivers.

If the problem arises from hardware problems such as malfunctioning RAM, faulty hard drive, the cause may be overheating, the device is physically impacted, so it is damaged, or simply because the components have reached the end of their life cycle.

If the installation of new hardware causes errors, users should shut down the PC, remove the new hardware, and try restarting. If the restart still doesn’t work, users can try to start the PC in safe mode.

Besides, the computer will also display a blue screen of death when the driver is incompatible, encounters errors, corrupted system files, or conflicts between software, causing the system to be overloaded. These problems often come from installing new software, which is not fully compatible with the system.

Airlines continuously reschedule flights and make emergency landings because of BSOD errors. Photo: ABC News.

However, in the case of the July 19 incident, anti-malware company Crowdstrike admitted that the blue screen issue on Windows was caused by their update, which was released on the same day. “Your PC has a problem and needs to be restarted. We’re just gathering some error information, we’re going to reboot for you,” is the message displayed on the green screen of all Crowdstrike users.

The faulty file that caused the issue is believed to be related to the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor, a tool that analyzes Internet traffic to and from users’ computers, which is intended to check for malicious data.

“The ‘culprit’ in these cases is usually an update from an app. The update is installed and causes a major error in the operating system and leaves a blue screen of death,” said Alan Woodward at the University of Surrey, UK.

CrowdStrike’s software is very popular and widely used in the US. As a result, a series of outages have occurred on platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft 365, Azure, Instagram, eBay, Visa and AT&T.

There is currently no specific fix for this error. Users will have to wait for a patch that comes with the new update from CrowdStrike and Microsoft. The company said its engineering department is working to resolve the error.