Microsoft has announced a redesign of its signature "blue screen of death." The new design will ditch the traditional blue color and sad smiley face in favor of a minimalist error message screen.
"We’re previewing a new, more streamlined UI for unexpected restarts which better aligns with Windows 11 design principles and supports our goal of getting users back into productivity as fast as possible," the company wrote in a blog post.
The updated "screen of death" has appeared in Windows beta, Dev, and Canary builds of the Windows Insider program. There, it is green, but in stable versions of Windows it will most likely be black.
This is the first significant change to the boot screen since Microsoft added a sad face to the screen in Windows 8. Incidentally, Microsoft briefly made the "screen of death" black in Windows 11 test builds in 2021, but then the company returned to the classic version.