CrowdStrike outage: Photos, videos, and tales of IT workers fixing BSODs

The CrowdStrike outage that hit millions of Windows machines on Friday has left IT workers scrambling to get their organizations’ computer infrastructure back up and running. Images and stories shared online are illustrating just how tedious and overwhelming this task is.

Microsoft and CrowdStrike don’t have a way to push a fix for the issue to crashed computers. And in many cases, systems administrators can’t repair the machines remotely, either. That leaves them working in person to do things like use a Microsoft-created tool on a USB drive, delete a specific file while in Safe Mode, or restart affected computers over and over again, hoping an update comes through.

And these things must be done for every individual computer affected.

The work seems particularly visible in busy airports, where workers are trying to fix machines inside kiosks, attached to large information displays, or mounted high above the floor requiring a ladder.

And in one Reddit thread, people tell stories of long hours and hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of crashed machines: