Blue Screen of Death Is Dead
Microsoft’s famous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has died after 40 years. Rest in peace, the most panicked screen a Windows user could ever encounter. Now get ready to fear the Black Screen of Death.
In a blog post on its website today, the company said it is ready to launch a new error screen design it has been testing since March . In an update for all Windows 11 devices, version 24H2, coming “later this summer,” the BSOD will finally end its torment.
This will likely be a bittersweet moment for Windows users, who will undoubtedly have mixed feelings about the fate of the warning. Despite the ominous name, getting a BSOD wasn’t always as serious as it seemed — a simple glitch could cause it, and a reboot could easily fix it. It could be worse, but in many cases, the old BSOD simply added a little personality to the most annoying interruptions to your workflow. Especially in recent years, when you might see a frowning face emoji next to the error message.
But sometimes personality isn’t what you need, especially when you’re already stressed out about your computer encountering a serious error. Companies and travelers were hit with a particularly intractable blue screen of death during last year’s long-running Crowdstrike outage , so it makes sense that Microsoft might want to move away from any association with it.
Meet the new Black Screen of Death. More like other Windows error messages, this is a simple black screen that says in white text, “There was a problem with your device and it needs to restart.” Below that is a progress counter, as well as the error code and process that caused it.
“The updated user interface is more readable and better aligned with the design principles of Windows 11,” said David Weston, Microsoft’s vice president of enterprise and OS security, in a blog post today.
I’ll admit that it’s probably a little less ominous than the current BSOD, which wastes a lot of screen real estate on that big frowning smiley face and used to say “Your PC ran into a problem it can’t handle” before anything else. Personally, I think the new approach might better reflect the majority of situations that can cause a BSOD – they’re usually not as scary as they seem. Plus, the old error screen didn’t actually tell you what process had crashed, so seeing that on its replacement is a nice bonus (it sometimes showed a QR code, but I often couldn’t scan it before my PC rebooted).
Still, part of me will miss the old Blue Screen of Death, just as I miss the Red Ring of Death that took my first Xbox 360. Stockholm syndrome, I guess?
In any case, Microsoft says that when it releases a new Black Screen of Death (not the official name of the error message, but it wasn’t a “Blue Screen of Death” either), it will also release a new Quick Machine Recovery feature that will help you get back into PCs that can’t reboot properly. In other words, the company is trying to make sure we don’t get another Crowdstrike incident anytime soon. And if we do, we hope it makes us feel a little less sad.