Internet crash today 19/7/24

[Nick]

I rest my case! Being fair, it was a pretty predictable cause. I've written kernel drivers and a) they're very difficult to get 100% right, and b) when things don't go right, it's very difficult (in kernel mode) to catch and then sensibly handle the issue. As mentioned elsewhere, if you have a kernel exception, bizarre as it may seem, crashing the machine can be (for the user's data integrity) the safest thing to do.

EDIT: What I suspect happened was that a fairly tame change to a configuration file (which is all that was in the update that caused the issue) exposed a coding flaw in the kernel-level driver that CrowdStrike use and which is loaded early in the Windows boot process (in order to catch nasty viruses etc. - generally the earlier you can load, the better)
The flaw itself may have been there a long time and is probably something like a buffer overflow causing a stack corruption, or memory pointer being corrupted etc. I admit this is supposition, but a configuration file change which introduced a longer-than-previously-used string or similar and which in itself may seem harmless, could easily expose this type of flaw. It's a coding error, a bug, which was not caught in testing and which was not or could not be caught and handled safely by the driver in question, hence the BSOD and reboot.