Microsoft Wants To Stop Another Crowdstrike Outage From Damaging PCs: Here’s How

Last Updated:November 22, 2024, 09:12 IST

Microsoft faced one of its biggest IT outage earlier this year when the Crowdstrike update crashed the systems.

The company wants to prevent another BSOD outage to strike the industry.

The Crowdstrike outage caused a major IT problem for Microsoft as millions of Windows PCs went offline. The company has managed to recover from that incident and is now preparing the tools to battle another outage like that, if it ever happens.

The biggest issue with the Crowdstrike incident was that a simple update error resulted in the blue screen of death error for millions of PCs. Microsoft clearly doesn’t want a repeat of that, so it has set up a new program that tries to take care of the chinks in Windows PC which caused the outage in a big way.

Plans To Stop Another Crowdstrike-like Outage

The first major change that Microsoft has planned with the new Windows Resiliency Initiative is to keep its security vendors within the user mode to safeguard the kernel mode. The company is “developing new Windows capabilities that will allow security product developers to build their products outside of kernel mode.” Blocking this route could go a long way in keeping Windows machines secure from future Crowdstrike-like outages.

The other major addition is the ability to remotely fix issues with Windows systems, in case the IT admin has to handle an event of a similar scale or urgency. Microsoft is creating a Recovery Environment, as mentioned in a report by The Verge, which will ensure that any misbehaving or corrupt file can be centrally deleted for a lot of customers.

And yes, Microsoft is also looking to foolproof its own backend structure so that another faulty update doesn’t end up causing the blue screen of death (BSOD) issue. So, next time a Crowdstrike or any other security vendor for Windows decides to push an update, it has to be done with all the checks thoroughly done.

The task for Microsoft is clear but not the easiest. The company has a large chunk of its enterprise customers running on Windows PCs, that needs to be protected at all cost. One can never say that a Crowdstrike-like outage will never happen again but the company owes it to its customers that it does everything in its power to stop or minimise its impact on the industry.

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