Microsoft to Replace Blue Screen of Death with Black Screen in Windows 11

is a senior editor and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has been a staple in Windows for almost 40 years, but that's changing. Microsoft announced earlier this year that it is revamping its BSOD error message in Windows 11, and it will now be called the Black Screen of Death. The new design replaces the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code with a simpler black screen.

The new BSOD resembles the black screen seen during a Windows update. It will display the stop code and faulty system driver, providing more information than before. This change aims to eliminate the need for IT admins to extract crash dumps from PCs and analyze them with tools like WinDbg to identify issues.

David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, explained, \"This is an effort to offer clarity, better information, and expedite issue resolution for us and customers. It provides cleaner details on what went wrong, distinguishing between Windows and a component.\"

Microsoft plans to introduce this new BSOD design in a Windows 11 update later this summer, along with the Quick Machine Recovery feature to restore non-booting machines swiftly. These changes are part of Microsoft's broader initiative to enhance Windows' resilience following last year's CrowdStrike incident that caused many Windows machines to boot to a BSOD.