Microsoft on CrowdStrike outage: have you tried turning it off and on? (15 times)

You can’t make IT up.

Have you turned it off and on again? That familiar refrain from IT departments and The IT Crowd is being echoed by Microsoft today as a recommended way of fixing the faulty CrowdStrike update that has taken down thousands of Windows PCs and servers today.

In a support note on Microsoft’s Azure outage page, the company says it has heard from customers that rebooting virtual machines and PCs multiple times can help. “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,” says Microsoft.

If rebooting a machine 15 times doesn’t do the trick, Microsoft recommends the workaround that many IT admins have been using today, which involves deleting the faulty CrowdStrike driver. In the case of Microsoft’s Azure virtual machines, it should be easier for IT admins to mount a disk and attempt to delete the faulty file rather than having to boot machines into Safe Mode.

We’ve heard from some IT admins that rebooting is indeed fixing the problems. It’s amazing that one of the worst global IT outages in history can be fixed by just turning it off and on again. A meme saves the day.

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