this wasn’t a microsoft issue, well mostly wasn’t. The issue is Crowdstrike rolled out a horribly written update to production without testing or vetting. The problem was this driver that they rolled out borked machines. as a result Windows would get stuck in a bootloop and BSOD.

The amusing thing (at least to me) was the fix was quite simple depending on how valuable you were to your company. If you were some low level peon you could simply boot into safe mode and delete the crowdstrike folder with the bad driver in it, or rename it, and your system would boot. IF you were someone who was higher up the food chain chances are you couldn’t as your HDD/SSD would be encripted with microsofts bitlocker. you need codes from microsoft in order to decrypt the bitlocker OR if your IT department was worth it’s salt they’d have the codes stored on an external USB. many did not. Ok so get the codes from microsoft I hear you say, nope, Bitlocker was using crowdstrike for the servers that kept the codes to distribute annnnnd no one could access them.

So the problem was two fold as is the solution. One people need to ditch crowdstrike or simply don’t start business with them. the CEO of crowdstrike is a damn numbskull who was also behind the mcafee outage a few years ago that was equally fucked. he was the CTO for mcafee at the time. the guy doesn’t believe in proper roll outs and unit testing in favor of pushing shit live as quickly as possible.

Next Microsoft needs to do away with it’s stupid bitlocker. It’s more of a hassle than anything and most people I know that still use windows end up disabling it on their machines anyways. When you need a code to decrypt your damn SSD/HDD just to recover your system or simply boot into safemode you know it’s a stupid “feature”.

but yeah, more home grown shit that actually works would be grand.