Did you turn it off and on? Microsoft says some users solved the CrowdStrike problem after rebooting up to 15 times.
- A mass IT outage is disrupting operations at banks, retailers, airports, and other organizations.
- Microsoft said some people rebooted their devices up to 15 times to troubleshoot the issue.
Microsoft has a solution for its mass IT outage: lots and lots of reboots.
The outage began disrupting industries on Thursday and continued into Friday morning, according to a post by Microsoft's cloud platform Azure.
"We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD) and get stuck in a restarting state," the company said.
To fix this problem, Microsoft said customers may need to reboot their devices more than a dozen times.
"We've received feedback from customers that several reboots (as many as 15 have been reported) may be required, but overall feedback is that reboots are an effective troubleshooting step at this stage," Microsoft said.
The company also said some customers reported successful recoveries after completing "multiple Virtual Machine restart operations" on their devices. There are options to troubleshoot with the Azure Portal, Azure CLI, or Azure Shell.
The CEO of CrowdStrike, a third-party cybersecurity giant used by Microsoft, said in an X post that the issue originated from a "defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts."
"This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed," George Kurtz wrote.
Kurtz later apologized to customers during an NBC News interview, saying it "could take some time" for the systems to rebound.
Meanwhile, everything from air travel to banks has been impacted by the CrowdStrike issue.
Cybersecurity expert James Bore told BI that the outages were caused by CrowdStrike's Falcon tool. He said Falcon has a corrupted file that's "knocking out computers, putting them into what's known as the 'blue screen of death."
Bore said that fixing the issue would require manually rebooting a device in "safe mode" and deleting the specific file.