Yep, that’s definitely a fix…
If this somehow works, good on Microsoft, but what the fuck are they doing on boot cycles 2-14? Can they be configured to do it in maybe 5? 3? Some computers have very long boot cycles.
Probably triggers some auto-rollback mechanism I’d guess, to help escape boot loops? I’m just speculating.
Welp, Ars Technica has another theory:
Microsoft’s Azure status page outlines several fixes. The first and easiest is simply to try to reboot affected machines over and over, which gives affected machines multiple chances to try to grab CrowdStrike’s non-broken update before the bad driver can cause the BSOD. Microsoft says that some of its customers have had to reboot their systems as many as 15 times to pull down the update.
There’s nothing magical about the 15th reboot - Crowdstrike runs an update check during the boot process, and depending on your setup and network speeds, it can often take multiple reboots for that update to get picked up and applied. If it fails to apply the update before the boot cycle hits the point that crashes, you just have to try again.
One thing that can help, if anyone reads this and is having this problem, is to hard wire the machine to the network. Wifi is enabled later in the startup sequence which leaves little (or no) time for the update to get picked up an applied before the boot crashes. The wired network stack starts up much earlier in the cycle and will maximize the odds of the fix getting applied in time.
I was thinking (from reading the headline) that if one specific component fails 15 times during boot or so, it will just automatically get disabled by the system, so that you don’t run into an unavoidable boot loop.
But this makes sense as well, if they did write “up to” in the article (as others have stated). Even though I find the confidence weird. Imagine you have some weird dial-up or satellite internet solution for your system, which just needs time to connect, and then maybe also just provide a few bytes/kilobytes per second. This must be rare, but I’m 100% confident that there exists a system like this :D
Edit: okay, I should read first. The 15 times thing is said for azure machines.
macOS has something to this effect where if it detects too many kernel panics in a row on boot it will disable all kernel extensions on the next reboot and it pops up a message explaining this. I’ve had this happen to me when my GPU was slowly dying. It eventually did bite the dust on me, but it did let me get into the system a few times to get what I needed before it was kaput.
Well in the time until Windows rebooted 15 times Windows 12 will be out.
there’s an easy fix. it could be done with a single boot attempt if M$ hadnt made it so needlessly difficult to enter safe mode
Many of the machines in question will have safe mode walled off for security reasons anyway.
fair enough. i can see that disabling safe mode would be a decent security measure. but by the time that kind of exploit is used, you’ve already got bad actors inside your network and there are much easier methods available to pivot to other devices and accounts.
Most of our machines at my office run Win 10 or 11 and we haven’t had the blue screen. I was wondering why we hadn’t experienced this. Still don’t know.
Azure is MS’s cloud computing. As long as you weren’t using MS OneDrive, or 365 Office, or something else that relied on MS cloud, you’re good.
Actually it’s due to whether your company uses CrowdStrike or not.
Supposedly, one of the fixes (aside from rebooting and hoping it grabs the update fire) is to delete a single file in the CrowdStrike directory after booting into safe mode.
I just spent the morning doing this with my help desk team, although we just do it via command prompt at the recovery screen. We’ve had a 100% success rate so far at 93 devices and counting. I’m glad our organization practices read only Friday, at least.
Yes, but Azure platform itself was using it. So many of those systems were down overnight (and there’s probably still stragglers). The guy you responded to specifically called out Azure-based services.
