Can’t read the rest of the article because paywall but apparently users have chimed in saying rebooting 15 times worked for them. Whether they were serious or not remains a question. I can also imagine it was a time-related thing and after 15 reboots enough time has passed for it to be fixed so the user thought 15 times was the magic number.
Regardless, it’s been a shit show.
Paywall bypass- https://archive.is/fA4pK
Much appreciated. Now I have access to the quote:
“We have received feedback from customers that several reboots (as many as 15 have been reported) may be required, but overall feedback is that reboots are an effective troubleshooting step at this stage."
So fuck the headline, the real message is: yes, rebooting is an effective troubleshooting step at the moment.
I don’t know the exact timing of that message in the timeline of the incident, so it could be early “please restart and see if issue persists” or late “something was updated, rebooting will probably help”, I don’t know.
ArsTechnica has a bit more detail. I’ll quote the important bit below.
… 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.
This seems like an interesting application of a “race condition”. They are hoping that the update outraces the program starting up enough to crash…
My understanding is, it’s just a matter of if the Crowdstrike updater service manages to connect to the internet long enough to download the patch before the core service takes a shit.
My team and I last night were lucky enough that our computers came back up after a single reboot following the BSOD. VPN and certain applications were wonky the rest of the night.
We had nearly 300 servers impacted, almost 100 still down. All planned maintenance for the weekend has been cancelled. Incidents like these make me very glad I climbed the IT ladder enough to not be in a support role anymore.
“Have you tried turning it off and on again 15 times?”
I gave up after 14! Silly me.
After time 14, updates. Begin again.
If you do it 15 times while holding down the B key Mew appears for you to catch too!
But only if you look under the mousepad.
I tried this but only found a lava cookie. Did they change this for Windows 11?
Hilariously, if Microsoft required WHQL certification for AV kernel drivers like they do for every other, this would have never happened. It would have been discovered in the first hour of testing easy.
Nope, done it probably 50 times. Fake news :)
Reminds me of the good ol’ days.
“Three man, you always tell me to do three!”
