Government cybersecurity agency issues advisory for Windows users facing 'blue screen of death'

Microsoft Windows

In the light of the global Microsoft services — cloud and others — outage, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) has issued an advisory to Microsoft Windows users. Cert-In has graded the severity rating as “critical” and issued some tips for Microsoft Windows users who might be facing the “blue screen of death” on their systems.

Earlier today, a lot of Windows users experienced “blue screen of death” as their systems crashed. The issue, as per multiple reports, was due to the latest update of Crowd Strike.

In the advisory Cert-In noted that if “hosts are still crashing and unable to stay online to receive Channel File Changes”, then they can follow the below-mentioned steps:

Step 1:Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment

Step 2: Navigate to the C:\Windows\System 32\Drivers\CrowdStrike directory

Step 3: Locate the file matching “C00000291*.sys” and delete it

Step 4: Boot the host normally

Furthermore, Cert-In advised users to check the latest updates from Crowd Strike portal.

What is the “blue screen of death” on Windows?

Several users since morning have reported issues with their Windows PCs and faced the blue screen of death. Blue Screen errors, also known as black screen errors or STOP code errors, occur when a critical problem causes Windows to unexpectedly shut down or restart. When this happens, you might see a message saying, “Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer” or a similar alert.

Microsoft in a statement on social media platform X said, "We remain committed in treating this event with the highest priority and urgency while we continue to address the lingering impact for the Microsoft 365 apps that are in a degraded state."