The problem began in the morning when employees in various IT firms attempted to start their workday. Instead of the usual login screen, many were met with the dreaded blue screen error, rendering their computers unusable. This issue has caused widespread panic and frustration, as critical operations came to a halt.
IT departments in affected companies were working to resolve the issue. The scale of the problem meant that many employees were unable to access their workstations till last reports came in. This disruption has led to a significant loss of productivity and has affected project deadlines.
An employee, working in a major IT organisation in Hyderabad, said: “The team tried everything, but could not reboot the computers. One person got in and was able to turn on the computer, but soon his computer got the blue screen and couldn’t login again.”
The impact of the outage in Hyderabad is not uniform. Many companies run the systems on N-1 (redundancies), so that the workflow is not impacted. This is the reason that most banking operations are not impacted much, said Prashanth Nandella, president of Hyderabad Software Enterprises Association.
In the meantime, developers got together a workaround for individual booting systems, which can be used to get the systems back online -
· Press F8 or Shift + F8 to boot Windows into safe mode or the windows recovery environment.
· Go to this directory on the system - C:-Windows-System32-drivers-CrowdStrike
· Locate the file matching "C-00000291*.sys" and delete it.
· Restart computer.
