Inside the 78 minutes that took down millions of Windows machines

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Major IT outage hits banks, airlines, and businesses worldwide
Photo by Harun Ozalp / Anadolu via Getty Images
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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…

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