I'm noticing that over 50 Dell 5040 machines are freezing about five minutes after booting up. After some investigation, it looks like reinstalling Crowdstrike temporarily resolves the issue. It seems like there's a memory scan or a similar process that kicks in around that uptime, causing the machines to lock up completely and become unresponsive on the network. I'm surprised I haven't seen any discussions about this problem elsewhere, especially since we're all using similar setups. We first started getting complaints about this on Wednesday morning, by the way. The machines are running Windows 10 LTSC 1809/1806.
4 Answers
We've been hearing similar complaints about system freezes not just with Dell 5040s but also on Dell 7540 laptops and HP Z2-G4 workstations this week. Did you find any specific reason that made you suspect Crowdstrike was the culprit?
Which version of Windows are you running on your machines?
We're a Dell and Crowdstrike shop and haven't run into these freezes. It might be worth noting that the freezing coincided with Patch Tuesday. Do you guys typically roll out Windows updates immediately after release? That could send Crowdstrike into RFM mode while waiting for approval, causing some issues.
No, we don't apply updates immediately. It seems that reinstalling or even just removing Crowdstrike hasn’t fully resolved the issue for all machines. It’s really puzzling!
Yes, we also have a few laptops crashing and getting the blue screen error with the 7450 models. We're still running tests but have been applying BIOS updates to see if that helps.
They’re all on Windows 10 LTSC 1809/1806.