#86 What is the Blue Screen of Death?

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Your faithful writer,
Dr. Daniel Smith

A Microsoft glitch is causing IT problems around the world today.

As a result:

• more than 1,500 flights have been cancelled

• hospitals are cancelling surgeries and non-urgent appointments

• courts are shutting down for the day

• TV channels can’t broadcast the news

• some businesses can’t take payments or pay their employees

The glitch was reportedly caused by an update sent out by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which saw its stock price fall by as much as ~15% when trading opened today.

Elon Musk called it “the biggest IT fail ever.”

This brings us to today’s topic: The Blue Screen of Death.

The Blue Screen of Death is an error message you get when there’s a major problem with your Windows computer.

If you’ve used Windows for a long time, you’ve definitely seem some variation of this before.

The Blue Screen of Death isn’t a new thing. It’s been around since the 1990s, and it’s evolved with each new version of Windows.

The global IT outage that hit Microsoft systems today is making it impossible for users worldwide to access their computers.

For you and me, that’s not the biggest problem in the world.

But for businesses and government agencies that run on Windows, it basically means that they can’t function properly.

The CEO of cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which is worth $75 billion, said that the outage was caused by an error in a small Crowdstrike content update sent out last night.

The company said it was not caused by a cyberattack or hack.

Blue Screen of Death History: The term ‘screen of death’ has been applied to other error messages as well and has become a meme in itself.

The ‘screen of death’ phrase has been around since the original Windows operating system was released in the 1990s.

The term was first used in a 1995 book called PC Overkill, and the following chart shows that searches for ‘blue screen of death’ began to appear around 1995.

Here’s a clip showing Bill Gates experiencing the Blue Screen of Death during a presentation of Windows 98 in the late 1990s:

So, if the Blue Screen of Death is disrupting work or travel for you today, try to take solace in the fact that it’s been annoying Windows users for nearly 30 years.

We could also think about how this worldwide error demonstrates the surprising fragility of the digital infrastructure that we rely upon for every aspect of our lives, but that may be a bit depressing.

Have a great weekend, folks.

ART OF THE DAY

Thank you for reading. Please reply to this email if you have any thoughts or feedback.

Yours,
Dan