There used to be – and might still be – a tradition at the UK’s Reading music festival where you’d be lying in your sleeping bag at night and you’d suddenly hear a low rumbling in the distance, which would then become indecipherable shouting, which you’d soon realise was rows of campers shouting the word ‘bollocks’ from their tents in a sort of Mexican wave, getting louder and closer as you waited in fizzy anticipation for your turn to shout. You’d then listen to the whole thing play out in reverse as the bollocktide receded into the pleasant autumn twilight.
I thought about this as I read multiple headlines referring to the Windows blue screen of death as ‘iconic’ this morning. Extreme annoyance elevated to the status of folk legend. Mythologising a shared experience of catastrophe. The whole world shouting ‘bollocks’ together.
Microsoft announced that they’d be redesigning the BSOD back in March via a blog post accompanying a preview build for members of their Windows Insiders program. Those using the preview found that the BlueSOD was no more, replaced instead by a BlackSOD. Now, Windows have confirmed they’re sticking with it, and it’s due for a rollout for everyone on Windows 11 later this Summer.
“This is really an attempt on clarity and providing better information and allowing us and customers to really get to what the core of the issue is so we can fix it faster,” Microsoft’s VP of enterprise and OS security David Weston told The Verge. “Part of it just cleaner information on what exactly went wrong, where it’s Windows versus a component.”
Here’s a blog post from yesterday if you fancy reading their full explanation of the update. It contains sentences like “a key trait of a resilient organization is the ability to maintain productivity and minimize disruptions”, and “in today’s threat landscape, organizations can’t afford to treat resilience as a reactive measure”. As the Verge note, this is all likely in response to the far-reaching Crowdstrike outages last year, which indeed had a lot of people shouting “bollocks” in unison.
The blue screen of death has been around for 40 years at this point, since Windows’ first version in 1985. I imagine most of you also remember the BSOD’s console gaming cousin, the Xbox 360’s hardware failure-signifying red ring of death, aka the reason I’ve never played Fable 2. Other variants include Amiga’s Guru Meditation Error (based on an in-joke about staff adopting calming poses in response to crashes), and Apple’s Sad Mac. None of which are as good as this one though:
If you’ve missed out on what else those loveable tykes at Microsoft HQ have been up to recently, the company confirmed in May that they’d supplied AI technology to the Israeli military for use in Gaza. That same month, they kicked off plans to start laying off 3% of their 228,000 strong workforce (around 7000). According to a recent Bloomberg report, they’re planning to lay off more workers at Xbox soon. The company made around $88 billion in profit for 2024’s fiscal year.
