BSOD is dead

Microsoft killed the blue screen of death. It has been with us for 35 years and has changed form and text many times. It will be a black screen, as we can see in a screenshot from the blog post The Windows Resiliency Initiative: Building resilience for a future-ready enterprise. So we can keep speaking of BSOD, but it will be a black screen from now on.

To celebrate the life and death of the blue screen, I started an Instagram account where I will publish all BSOD and crash screens I have encountered in my life. I will only publish photos of screens present in public spaces or visible from public areas (stores, train stations, streets…); not the ones I find in my home or at work, though I have seen many of those too.

My Goal here is to shine a light on our digital fragility. We live surrounded by computers – they’re in our coffee shops, airports, elevators, and even our refrigerators. When they fail (remember the CrowdStrike chaos?), they remind us just how dependent we’ve become on these machines. We’ve built a world where a single crashed screen can bring entire systems to their knees, leaving us utterly helpless.

You can find the account on Instagram.