Windows 11’s Black Screen of Death is blue again

Windows’ Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is one of the saddest signature features of Microsoft’s widely used operating system. It’s been around for years. It’s the symbol of immense frustration and well-deserved anger. You’ve always despised the blue screen because its arrival meant something went wrong with the OS. It also might have indicated that you might have lost data. Or that you had to perform some sort of life-saving procedure, like reinstalling Windows in its entirety. Windows 10 corrected some of those issues, and the blue screens were much rarer. But those blue screen crashes weren’t entirely gone. Then Microsoft did the unthinkable with the Windows 11 release, killing the blue screen. But Microsoft only changed the color to black, keeping the functionality in place. The company has fixed this problem in an update that will soon be available for download.

Windows 11 Black Screen of Death

As much as you might hate the blue screen of death in Windows, the feature is still something that Microsoft very much needs. Even in Windows 11. The terrifying error message can help IT professionals, as well as Microsoft, diagnose software issues that crash the OS and fix them. It’s really the implementation that’s annoying at this point.

Changing the color from black to blue in Windows 11 made little sense when we first heard of it. It’s still an error message that will display text providing some information about the problem. At the same time, the system will collect data about the crash before the computer restarts.

The error prompt will still break whatever you were doing on your PC the moment the crash happened. If anything, the blue screen is better than black. That’s because you’ve grown accustomed to associating the color with a significant Windows problem.

The blue screen’s triumphant return

Just as it’s unclear why Microsoft went for black, we have no idea why blue is coming back to the error message in Windows 11. But Ars Technica points out that Microsoft is about to revert to blue via an imminent Windows 11 update download.

The update will fix several Windows 11 bugs, with Microsoft having pushed it to Beta and Release Preview Insider Channels a few days ago. That’s version 22000.346, which fixes various known issues with the operating system. The list includes a rendering issue for the new Taskbar and Start menu, Bluetooth audio volume control problems, issues with 32-bit apps, and printers.

These fixes are more important than the Black Screen of Death getting back to blue. But you’ll certainly notice (and appreciate) this one whenever Windows 11 crashes next. Hopefully, it’ll be a while until anything crashes your computer to the point where you’ll be treated to a blue screen.

You’ll first have to get the new OS release, however. Microsoft releasing it to the Release Preview channel means it could be a few days or weeks until you can download the Windows 111 update on your machine.