Computers worldwide suddenly went into simultaneous rebooting loops as a result of a legitimate Windows file being mis-identified as a virus.  According to McAfee, a software update posted at 9 a.m. Eastern time on April 21, 2010 is the culprit, affecting corporate users of McAfee’s security software around the world.

Hospitals, schools and government offices were impacted by the glitch, causing a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island to curtail non-trauma ER and elective surgery treatment until the problem was resolved.

McAfee spokesmen said it appears consumer versions of their products were not affected by the update.

Instructions for restoring the quarantined files can be found here.

McAfee has released a SuperDAT remediation Tool to restore the svchost.exe file quarantined during this debacle.

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Download the tool and follow these instructions to recover your OS.