Microsoft Windows outage: Is your laptop shutting down again and again? Here's how to fix it

Microsoft Cloud outage has affected millions of computer systems worldwide. Users have report sudden shutdown or restart of their systems which Microsoft said is due to a recent CrowdStrike update. As per Microsoft's Service Health Status updates, the preliminary root cause is "a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads (that has) caused interruption between storage and compute resources, and which (has) resulted in connectivity failures." This has affected “downstream (and dependent) Microsoft 365 services”, the company said.

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CrowdStrike Engineering identified a content deployment related to this issue and reverted those changes. The company posted steps for resolution for affected Windows users.

Here's what you can do in order to work amid the Microsoft outage:

1. Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment
2. Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory
3. Locate the file matching C-00000291*.sys and delete it
4. Boot the host normally.

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What Microsoft said on the outage?

In a detailed thread on X, Microsoft said it is "investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services". It added, "We're working on rerouting impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion. We're still observing a positive trend in service availability while we continue to redirect impacted traffic. We still expect users will continue to see gradual relief as we continue to mitigate the issue.”

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Services are still seeing "continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions", the tech giant said.