Microsoft Memes Celebrate ‘Happy International Blue Screen Day’

Realistically, there’s nothing funny about the massive global IT outage suffered by Microsoft on Friday morning. Flights, banks, 911 call centers and hospitals were among those affected, as the outage hit thousands of Windows PCs. But we laugh, because we must not cry. Memes and jokes about the issue began almost instantly. Here are some of our favorites.

Happy International BlueScreen Day!

One Twitter user dubbed the day International BlueScreen Day, as many computers showed the famed Microsoft Blue Screen of Death. How do you celebrate?

Find someone to blame!

It’d be nice to pin this mistake on one hapless IT worker, wouldn’t it? One Threads post tried to do it, writing, “So excited by new internship at Microsoft. I tripped on a couple of cables this morning but I think I put them back right.”

And another (fake, we hope) account pretended to be the CrowdStrike employee who brought down the whole world. It reads, “First day at CrowdStrike, pushed a little update and taking the afternoon off.”

A Mastodon post poked fun at an inappropriately timed CrowdStrike ad that claimed “62 minutes could bring your business down.” Good thing that’d never happen!

Sad times for the Sphere

The famed Vegas Sphere entertainment venue was the subject of some outage jokes, including an image of the entire sphere showing the Blue Screen of Death.

The Suez Canal remembered

Remember the debacle when the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal? One BlueSky user does, posting, “A line of code has gotten itself stuck in the Suez Canal.”

Why is MY computer working?

Some workers who thought the outage would give them a break from the daily grind found out that wasn’t the case. Many social media posts echoed this X user, who wrote, “Actively furious that the global Microsoft outage doesn’t seem to have affected my workplace.”

And not all Microsoft programs were affected. Wrote Max Pollard on X, “Microsoft outage but Teams and Outlook are both fine is the adult version of snow that doesn’t settle enough for a school closure.”

And another tweet suggested, “Whoever’s responsible for the Microsoft outage is getting fired anyway, so the smart thing to do would be knock Teams out for the day too and leave a hero.”