Screen displaying vertical lines

You need to contact Apple. If you have Apple Care it will take care of this hardware issue. If you did not get Apple Care, it's possible this is still convered under your warranty.

https://selfsolve.apple.com/agreementWarrantyDynamic.do

https://ssl.apple.com/support/

I have a similar problem, only worse...

I bought a Macbook Air on July 2014, but did NOT buy the extended Apple Care. On October 2015 the display simply stopped functioning one given morning. Not even the Apple logo appears when switching on the computer. The screen goes from pitch black to vertical lines varying colors from grey to light blue. This happened only 3 months after warranty expired. I've tried NVRAM Memory reset, but it had no effect.

As I am currently in Brazil working, I had to take it to the local technical assistance, which sent me a quote for nearly US$1,000 to replace the display. This is pretty much what paid for the whole computer when bought it in Boca Raton, FL.

Will Apple do something to replace it or will I have to simply abandon the Macbook Air? I'm not willing to pay so much to fix it and I find it absurd that this happened only 3 months after warranty expired. If it was a minor problem, OK. But the screen not working like this in such a short time is unacceptable.

The strangest part is that this happened the day after I updated the OS to the newest El Capitan.

Here are a couple of pictures showing what the screen looks like:

Since the problem started after Apple Care ended, you can appeal to Apple to get help. Sometimes if it's a known issue, they will cover items out of warranty.

Not an elegant solution, but you can buy an external display and use it to work with your Air. I have an old iMac 2006 that I connect via screen sharing to use the Mac for older software. This was my screen in the beginning. Now it's solid lines but I can still use the Mac via screen sharing.