Back in black: Microsoft Blue Screen of Death is going dark

The infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) will be replaced later this summer by a new black screen as part of Microsoft's Windows Resiliency Initiative (WRI).

Initially previewed in green, Microsoft's bet on black at least ensures backward compatibility for the BSOD acronym.

Images of the revised color scheme can be seen in the tech giant's "Quick machine recovery" documentation and in its blog post on the subject.

Redmond has been here before: Windows 3.1 had a black screen of death and a "blue screen of unhappiness."

The cosmetic rollback, scheduled to debut later this summer on all Windows 11 version 24H2 devices, coincides with functional reengineering of Windows code to better prevent, manage, and recover from security incidents.

The Windows code revision follows CrowdStrike's faulty sensor configuration update, which took down about 8.5 million Windows machines in July 2024. We note that ...