Crowdstruck (Windows Outage) - Computerphile - YouTube
Dr. Steve Bagley explains in layman’s terms what an operating system is:
[…] Imagine the difference between a house and a hotel. If you own a house, you can decide how to use the rooms, what color to paint the walls. But if that house becomes a hotel, you might give people the option to change the air conditioning temperature, but you wouldn’t let them fit air conditioning into their room without permission from the building owner. And it’s a bit the same with a computer. The operating system is a bit like the people who run the hotel in that it’s controlling all the resources for the system. So if Microsoft Word crashes, these days it’s not going to take down your computer because the operating system is set up in such a way that it can access resources that have been assigned to it and clean that up, and everything else continues hunky-dory.
And what happens if the operating system crashes and you get the blue screen of death (BSoD):
At that point, the thing that’s in charge of controlling everything has gone wrong, is corrupted, and can no longer run. So there’s pretty much no option at that point other than to halt the machine, say something’s gone wrong, and let the user reboot and restart.