Microsoft's 'Blue Screen of Death' Dies After 40 Years of Memes, Jokes, T-Shirts

Like Pudding Pops and Benetton sweaters, another 1980s icon is gone. After 40 years of delivering the tragic news of a PC crash to Windows users, Microsoft's infamous "blue screen of death" is going away. A black screen of death will be replacing it, albeit without the sad face.

The blue screen of death has been around since Windows 1.0 came out in 1985. Named for its bright blue color, it's a critical error screen that pops up on computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system when the system crashes. The text on the screen varies, but it's sometimes accompanied by a frowning face made up of a colon and a left parenthesis. :(

Microsoft says the new black screen of death, which it calls a "simplified UI for unexpected restarts," will appear in its place starting later this summer on all Windows 11, version 24H2 devices.

The black screen of death will show the stop code and faulty system driver, allowing IT admins to more quickly identify the issue that caused the crash, rather than having to use debugging software.

It's not just a cosmetic change, it's part of Microsoft's Windows Resiliency Initiative, which is designed to increase resiliency and security in Windows systems. In a blog post on Thursday, Microsoft said that the new black screen of death is part of "streamlining the unexpected restart experience" and aiding in "quick machine recovery." The aim is to reduce recovery time to 2 seconds following a PC crash.

The Windows Resiliency Initiative was launched following 2024's CrowdStrike outage, which caused systems to go offline for numerous businesses, airports and governmental services. More than 8 million devices were affected.

Over 40 years, the blue screen of death worked its way into pop culture, with plenty of memes, a subreddit devoted to it, and T-shirts and other items bearing its image.

When Microsoft suffered a massive global IT outage due to a CrowdStrike security update in July 2024, one X user dubbed the day International BlueScreen Day, sharing a photo of a conference room full of laptops all showing the blue screen of death.

Something about the unmistakable blue color of the error screen mixed with the frowny emoticon -- and the reminder that everyone's computer crashed once in a while -- made it an icon.

"I bought my husband a blue screen of death T-shirt and he wore it to work at Microsoft corporate headquarters back in the day," CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper said. "I wondered for a minute if anyone would be offended, but the first day he wore it, multiple people came up to him in the cafeteria to compliment it and ask where they could buy one for themselves."