Resolution criteria

This market resolves to YES if, prior to December 1, 2027 (11:59 PM Eastern Time), an outage or software failure causes the Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on at least 5 million Windows computers or devices worldwide simultaneously or as part of a single coordinated/propagating event.

Otherwise, this market resolves to NO.

• Cause: Any technical cause qualifies, including faulty vendor software/definition updates, Windows OS updates, rogue AI, malware, or cyber attacks, as long as the primary symptom on affected machines is a crash to a Windows stop error / Blue Screen of Death.

• Verification: The device count must be credibly estimated at 5,000,000 or greater by Microsoft, government cybersecurity agencies (e.g., CISA, NCSC), or a consensus of major cybersecurity intelligence firms and mainstream news organizations (e.g., Reuters, Bloomberg, AP).

• If an outage occurs before the cutoff date but official or aggregate impact figures are not finalized until after December 1, 2027, resolution will wait up to 30 days for credible estimates to be published.

Background

On July 19, 2024, a sensor configuration update pushed by CrowdStrike to its Falcon platform triggered kernel panics on Windows machines, resulting in global BSOD loops. Microsoft estimated that the incident affected approximately 8.5 million Windows devices—roughly less than 1% of all Windows machines globally—yet it grounded thousands of flights, crippled healthcare systems, and disrupted financial services worldwide due to the concentration of Falcon among enterprise and critical infrastructure systems.

This description was generated by AI. Reviewed and accepted by Sapphire828.

Spirit of the market: Focus on the blue screen of death and magnitude over 5 million, and less focus on the exact reason.