CrowdStrike Windows Reboot Issue: What exactly happened, which PC users are affected and how to fix it [Easy Explainer]

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Microsoft Windows outage UPDATE: CrowdStrike CEO says sorry, systems to start recovering soon

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized for the massive global IT outage which impacted the Windows operating system. In an interview to NBC News, he “vowed” to work with CrowdStrike's partners to get services back online. "Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it's coming up and it'll be operational. It could be some time for some systems that won't automatically recover,” Kurtz said.

"We're deeply sorry for the impact that we've caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” he added.

Millions of Windows users began reporting rebooting issues and encountering the 'Blue Screen of Death' with their computers this Friday afternoon. This outage is ongoing and has disrupted operations across various sectors, including aviation, publication, and more. The problem is quite widespread, prompting even the Indian government to issue an advisory to mitigate the issues.

This issue has been caused by a content update released by CrowdStrike for Windows hosts—meaning only Windows users were affected, leaving Mac and Linux users unaffected.

This naturally prompts the question:

For those uninitiated, CrowdStrike is an American cybersecurity company that works with companies including Microsoft to deploy tools like Falcon to prevent hacking and other security threats that can affect enterprises, and more. Many companies actively use its services to remain secure, and threat-free.

Now, on Friday, the company released a content update only for Windows that caused several issues with Windows computers running CrowdStrike services. This led to them entering a boot loop—repeatedly restarting and displaying the Blue Screen of Death. The company's CEO, George Kurtz, says that the issue with the update has been identified, and a fix has already been deployed. However, many systems are still experiencing problems, including millions of enterprise