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Windows 3.1 saves the day during CrowdStrike outage — Southwest Airlines scrapes by with archaic OS (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

109 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Southwest Airlines, the fourth largest airline in the US, is seemingly unaffected by the problematic CrowdStrike update that caused millions of computers to BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) because it used Windows 3.1. The CrowdStrike issue disrupted operations globally after a faulty update caused newer computers to freeze and stop working, with many prominent institutions, including airports and almost all US airlines, including United, Delta, and American Airlines, needing to stop flights.

Windows 3.1, launched in 1992, is likely not getting any updates. So, when CrowdStrike pushed the faulty update to all its customers, Southwest wasn’t affected (because it didn’t receive an update to begin with).

The airlines affected by the CrowdStrike update had to ground their fleets because many of their background systems refused to operate. These systems could include pilot and fleet scheduling, maintenance records, ticketing, etc. Thankfully, the lousy update did not affect aircraft systems, ensuring that everything airborne remained safe and were always in control of their pilots.

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[–] EleventhHour 89 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Windows 3.1 didn’t have the BSOD. It just froze. I remember with Windows NT 4, when we first got the BSOD, being so grateful that Microsoft decided to actually tell us that our computer wasn’t going to recover from the error. Otherwise, we’d just be sitting there, waiting, hoping it would unfreeze itself.

It never did

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I think that NT 3.51 had a blue screen of death

[–] fury 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Windows 3.1 did have a BSOD. It wasn't always fatal, you could try to hit enter to go back to Windows, but most of the time it wasn't really recoverable, Windows often wouldn't work right afterwards.

I ran into them all the time in 3.11 on our 486 which had some faulty RAM (the BSOD would even be scrambled). If we could get back to Windows after that, it'd just be in a zombie state where moving the mouse around would paint stuff over whatever was left on screen, and wouldn't respond to clicks or keypresses.

Fun times.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

IIRC Windows 95 did that as well

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Are you sure? I remember a long time ago being able to trigger a BSOD by opening Windows Calculator and dividing any number by 0. And I'm pretty sure that was 3.1 or 3.11.

In fact, I remember being able to change the color of the BSOD.

[–] EleventhHour 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

As another user mentioned, the BSOD first came in Windows NT 3.51.

But it definitely wasn’t in Windows 3.1 or Windows 3.11

[–] Psythik 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The other user is wrong. I clearly remember the BSoD in Windows 3.1. You can find it easily with a simple web search. Here it is: Here it is.

Hell, there were even memes of it:

Edit: I provided proof and was still downvoted lol. This place is quickly turning into reddit.

[–] Psythik 1 points 5 months ago

Windows 3.1 absolutely did have a BSoD, and as the other person mentioned, sometimes you could press a key and the OS would recover. More often than not you needed to reboot, though. Our family PC would BSoD all the damn time, and I had to put up with it throughout a good portion of my early childhood until my dad finally bought a Windows 98 SE PC. But that OS also had its fair share of instability issues. The "illegal operation" error message was a near-daily occurance.

It wasn't until we got our first NT-based machine (XP) that we stopped having constant issues with Windows. The DOS-based Windows OSes were notoriously unstable.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

😄it still do that on my over 20y old 2gig RAM Arch KDE on wayland macBookPro 🤔