After a botched CrowdStrike update brought down millions of computers, the company offered its partners $10 Uber Eats gift cards as an apology, TechCrunch reported. The gesture has sparked controversy as users question its appropriateness following the outage that disrupted airports, hospitals and businesses around the world.
Image source: Microsoft
The company sent out emails Tuesday offering a gift card, acknowledging the incident. The letter said: “We understand that additional work has been carried out due to the incident on July 19th. And for this we express our sincere gratitude and apologize for the inconvenience caused. To show our appreciation, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!” The email was sent from CrowdStrike’s corporate email address on behalf of Daniel Bernard, the company’s director of business development.
Image Source: CrowdStrike / Techcrunch.com
However, the next day, some users who posted information about the gift card reported that they received an error message when trying to redeem the offer, saying the voucher was invalid. TechCrunch journalists decided to check this information and saw an error message on the Uber Eats page: “The gift card was canceled by the organization that issued it.” CrowdStrike representatives have not yet commented on the situation.
Let’s remember that last Friday CrowdStrike released an update to its software product, which, due to an internal error, disabled about 8.5 million Windows devices. The update resulted in affected computers being unable to boot and instead receiving a warm welcome from the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSoD).
The glitch caused delays at airports in Amsterdam, Berlin, Dubai and London, as well as across the US. Some hospitals were forced to suspend operations.
Since the outage began, CrowdStrike has been regularly publishing information about its efforts to determine the cause of the incident. On Wednesday, the company said that due to a bug in the update validation process itself, the code was able to “pass verification despite having an issue.” The company also issued an apology on behalf of its CEO, George Kurtz, as well as its chief security officer, Shawn Henry.