I don't think that's what's happening here. As far as I know it's an issue with a driver installed on the computers, not with anything trying to reach out to an external server. If that were the case you'd expect it to fail to boot any time you don't have an Internet connection.
Windows is bad but it's not that bad yet.
Looks like the laptops are able to be recovered with a bit of finagling, so fortunately they haven't bricked everything.
And yeah staged updates or even just... some testing? Not sure how this one slipped through.
There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.
All our servers and company laptops went down at pretty much the same time. Laptops have been bootlooping to blue screen of death. It's all very exciting, personally, as someone not responsible for fixing it.
Apparently caused by a bad CrowdStrike update.
Edit: now being told we (who almost all generally work from home) need to come into the office Monday as they can only apply the fix in-person. We'll see if that changes over the weekend...
after calling Australia's emergency line 001
So close.