I saw many engineers blaming the outage on Microsoft 🤦♂️ SWEs blaming without knowing the root cause is concerning.
It is not Microsoft, it is Crowdstrike who released an update for Windows that had a bug. The patch runs in Kernel mode to monitor system activity at a low level.
Because it was running in Kernel mode, the buggy code was trying to access an invalid memory location that triggered a panic and showed a Blue Screen of Death.
The name of the driver file that had the buggy update is “C-00000291.sys”, deleting it fixes the issue, and unfortunately, this needs to be done manually.
Microsoft has nothing to do with it.