This doesn’t really answer my question but Crowdstrike do explain a bit here: crowdstrike.com/…/technical-details-on-todays-out…

These channel files are configuration for the driver and are pushed several times a day. It seems the driver can take a page fault if certain conditions are met. A mistake in a config file triggered this condition and put a lot of machines into a BSOD bootloop.

I think it makes sense that this was a preexisting bug in the driver which was triggered by an erroneous config. What I still don’t know is if these channel updates have a staged deployment (presumably driver updates do), and what fraction of machines that got the bad update actually had a BSOD.

Anyway, they should rewrite it in Rust.