I was hoping for a new bicycle.
CrowdStrike gave out $10 Uber Eats gift cards to say sorry for that global tech outage
“To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!” CrowdStrike said in an email to partners
By Rocio Fabbro, Quartz Media
PublishedYesterday
CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company behind last week’s massive global tech outage that caused entire industries to go dark, wants to apologize for giving its partners extra work — with a gift card.
Employees at CrowdStrike’s partner companies received an email earlier this week with a link to a $10 Uber Eats gift card, TechCrunch reported, citing several people who said on social media that they received the gift card and another source who confirmed it to the outlet.
“We recognize the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused,” a screenshot of the email posted by TechCrunch said. “And for that, we send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience.”
“To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!” the email concluded, followed by a code to access the funds.
Some said they, or someone they know, received the code, but that it appeared to have been revoked or was unusable when they tried to put in the code on the Uber Eats website or app.
A CrowdStrike spokesperson confirmed that it sent Uber Eats gift cards to “teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation,” and that high usage rates caused Uber to flag it as fraud in some cases.
The outage
Last Friday, a global tech outage caused by a faulty software update at CrowdStrike grounded tens of thousands of flights and caused problems at banks, hospitals, and elsewhere.
The outage cost Fortune 500 an estimated $5.4 billion in losses, according to cloud monitoring and insurance firm Parametrix.
CrowdStrike said the issue lay in its test software, which allowed an update to be approved despite containing “problematic content data.” In other words, it was a bug to a software update. Once the bug was received and loaded, the defective content in the file resulted in an output that “could not be gracefully handled,” causing Microsoft Windows operating systems to crash — what’s known as the “blue screen of death.”
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