The infamous “blue screen of death,” a source of frustration for countless Windows users over the years, is finally being retired.
Microsoft has announced plans to eliminate a widely criticized feature on Windows computers in the upcoming months. The company aims to “streamline the unexpected restart experience” by introducing a new black-colored screen, as detailed in a recent blog post.
A new “simplified” screen designed for “unexpected restarts” is set to be introduced later this summer across all Windows 11 devices operating on the 24H2 software version. The company announced that it would minimize reboots to approximately two seconds for the majority of users.
The infamous “blue screen of death” has been a recurring issue since its inception in the early 1990s. The phenomenon began with the notorious “blue screen of unhappiness” in Windows 3.1, introduced alongside the control-alt-delete shortcut, a solution for exiting unresponsive programs. This feature was accompanied by commentary from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Microsoft employee Raymond Chen reveals that the infamous “blue screen of death” first appeared in 1993 with the launch of Windows NT, indicating that the “system is unrecoverably dead at this point.”
A variant of the black screen feature was rolled out to Windows 11 users in 2021. The latest version features a revised dialogue.
Last July, a significant outage attributed to CrowdStrike left millions grappling with the notorious blue screen, as it crippled much of the world’s technology and rendered Windows-operated machines inoperable.
