Windows-based systems worldwide suffered outages as their users reported them entering recovery mode while flashing the infamous blue screen of death (BSOD). The issue was reportedly caused by an automated CrowdStrike update that went wrong.

Memecoins emerged shortly after, poking fun at the global fiasco that caused many businesses and institutions to halt work or find workarounds to operate. Industries across the board were affected, including banking, aviation, finance, and railways. No crypto companies reported issues because of the outage.

Nevertheless, memecoins draping themes around Microsoft, Windows, CrowdStrike, and BSoD took over, with some holding liquidity of about $50,000 in stablecoins. They witnessed soaring market capitalizations, spiking up to $1 million, as traders flocked to them to put in money early and get out before they crashed. These memecoins took over Ethereum and Solana. The Solana network saw hundreds of memecoins generated using the pump.fun deployer.

Coins surrounding occurrences like these observe immediate pumping, which traders capitalize on to register tremendous profits in small periods. However, the strategies are not sustainable over the long term as the tokens have no inherent value and crash to nothing when the world moves on from the topics they stem from.

While that occurred, many figures from the crypto ecosystem used the outage as an opportunity to highlight the stark differences between traditional technology and its counterpart, everything decentralized and blockchain-based.

The co-founder of the multisig wallet service, Jameson Lopp, took to X to express their views, “The massive infrastructure outages occurring globally right now are a stark example of why Bitcoin node software does not automatically update. Auto-updates introduce systemic risk.” Pro-crypto senator Cynthia Lummis wrote, “Do you know what form of currency hasn’t been affected by widespread cyber outages? Bitcoin. Vires in Numeris.”