Skip to main content

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

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.

Recommended Videos

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.

Delta has completely dropped the ball on this.

My family and I have been stranded at Atlanta airport for 4 days now.

0 car rentals
0 hotels (was able to get one through a rewards program 25 minutes from the airport for tonight)
0 available flights
4-5 hours in line to even… pic.twitter.com/O6GRssOrdk

— Multifamily Madness (@MultifamilyMad) July 22, 2024

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.

Judy Sanhz
Judy Sanhz is a Digital Trends computing writer covering all computing news. Loves all operating systems and devices.
Turns out, it’s not that hard to do what OpenAI does for less
OpenAI's new typeface OpenAI Sans

Even as OpenAI continues clinging to its assertion that the only path to AGI lies through massive financial and energy expenditures, independent researchers are leveraging open-source technologies to match the performance of its most powerful models -- and do so at a fraction of the price.

Last Friday, a unified team from Stanford University and the University of Washington announced that they had trained a math and coding-focused large language model that performs as well as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1 reasoning models. It cost just $50 in cloud compute credits to build. The team reportedly used an off-the-shelf base model, then distilled Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental model into it. The process of distilling AIs involves pulling the relevant information to complete a specific task from a larger AI model and transferring it to a smaller one.

Read more
New MediaTek Chromebook benchmark surfaces with impressive speed
Asus Chromebook CX14

Many SoCs are being prepared for upcoming 2025 devices, and a recent benchmark suggests that a MediaTek chipset could make Chromebooks as fast as they have ever been this year.

Referencing the GeekBench benchmark, ChromeUnboxed discovered the latest scores of the MediaTek MT8196 chip, which has been reported on for some time now. With the chip being housed on the motherboard codenamed ‘Navi,’ the benchmark shows the chip excelling in single-core and multi-core benchmarks, as well as in GPU, NPU, and some other tests run.

Read more
Chrome incognito just got even more private with this change
The Chrome browser on the Nothing Phone 2a.

Google Chrome's Incognito mode and InPrivate just became even more private, as they no longer save copied text and media to the clipboard, according to Windows Latest. The changes apply to Windows 11 and 10 users and were rolled out in 2024. However, neither Microsoft nor Google documented it.

Even though this change is not a recent feature, it's odd that neither tech giant thought it was worth mentioning. Previously, the default setting was that when a user saved text or images to the clipboard history, it was synced with Cloud Clipboard on Windows. Moreover, accessing this synced content was as simple as pressing the Windows and V keys, which poses a security risk, especially when using incognito mode.

Read more