New Delhi: The Indian Government’s CERT-In has issued a ‘critical’ advisory in response to the significant ongoing outage affecting millions of Microsoft Windows users globally.
The advisory details the problems with Microsoft Azure and their impact on the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor, which is causing PCs to reboot and display the ‘Blue Screen of Death.’ The organization, known for its regular vulnerability reports, has provided a list of workarounds for users.
CERT-In has noted that the issues with the latest CrowdStrike update have been ‘reverted’ by the CrowdStrike team. The organization has also outlined several methods for users to stay online to receive Channel File Changes:
– Users should attempt to boot their Windows in Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment.
– Users should navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\CrowdStrike directory and delete the file named ‘C-00000291.sys.’
– Users should then reboot their host normally, as per CERT-In’s guidance.
For those affected by this issue, CERT-In recommends regularly checking for new updates from the CrowdStrike portal, as they are likely to resolve the problems originating from Microsoft’s side.
Furthermore, Microsoft has stated that it is actively working to rectify the issues impacting both Microsoft Azure and the Office 365 suite of applications and services.
Microsoft has officially recognized the problem, attributing it to a ‘configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads.’ This change led to an interruption between storage and compute resources, resulting in connectivity failures that impacted downstream Microsoft 365 services reliant on these connections.
This disruption also affected the CrowdStrike Falcon agents, causing the PCs to restart and display the Blue Screen of Death.