The 78 minutes that took down millions of Windows machines
On Friday morning, shortly after midnight in New York, disaster started to unfold around the world. In Australia, shoppers were met with Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) messages at self-checkout aisles. In the UK, Sky News had to suspend its broadcast after servers and PCs started crashing. In Hong Kong and India, airport check-in desks began to fail. By the time morning rolled around in New York, millions of Windows computers had crashed, and a global tech disaster was underway.
In the early hours of the outage, there was confusion over what was going on. How were so many Windows machines suddenly showing a blue crash screen? “Something super weird happening right now,” Australian cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt wrote in a post on X. On...