Microsoft users hit by huge outage

Microsoft users around the world are experiencing an error screen known as the “blue screen of death,” as widespread tech outages persist.

The U.S. tech giant was impacted by an update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike which led to a major outage. Many other businesses have also been affected.

“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 [blue screen of death]) and get stuck in a restarting state. We approximate impact started around 19:00 UTC on the 18th of July,” Microsoft said in an update at 5:40 a.m. ET.

“We can confirm the affected update has been pulled by CrowdStrike. Customers that are continuing to experience issues should reach out to CrowdStrike for additional assistance,” the company added.

Earlier, Microsoft had said its cloud services had been restored after an outage that affected its Azure services and Microsoft 365 suite of apps in the central U.S. region. A company spokesperson told Dow Jones these are two different and non-related issues: one relating to Azure, and another relating to CrowdStrike.

They added that they “anticipate a resolution is forthcoming,” in respect to the Crowdstrike problem.

Microsoft shares were around 2% lower in premarket trading at 5:53 a.m. ET.