CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers with a botched update worldwide last week, is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, according to several people who say they received the gift card and a source who also received one.
Gift Card Distribution CrowdStrike
On Tuesday, a source said they received an email from CrowdStrike offering them the gift card. Because the company recognizes “the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused.”
“And for that, we send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience. The email read, according to a screenshot shared by the source. Someone else posted the same email on X. “To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late-night snack is on us!”
Voucher Issues
On Wednesday, some people who posted about the gift card said that. When they went to redeem the offer, they got an error message saying the voucher had been canceled. When I checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”
Company Response CrowdStrike
CrowdStrike spokesperson Kevin Benacci confirmed that the company sent the gift cards.
“We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation. Uber flagged it as a fraud because of high usage rates,” Benacci said in an email.
Impact of the Faulty Update CrowdStrike
According to Microsoft, CrowdStrike released a faulty update on Friday that rendered around 8.5 million Windows devices unusable. The update caused the affected computers to be stuck at the infamous “blue screen of death,” or BSOD, a bright blue error screen with a message shown when Windows crashes or cannot load because of a critical software failure.
Global Disruptions
The outage caused delays at airports in Amsterdam, Berlin, Dubai, London, and across the United States. It also caused several hospitals to halt surgeries and paralyzed countless businesses worldwide.
Ongoing Investigation
Since the outage began on Friday, CrowdStrike has regularly published updates on its efforts to determine what caused the mass outage. In an update on Wednesday, the company said that because of a bug during the process of checking that updates are ready to be released to customer devices, the faulty code “passed validation despite containing problematic content data.”
Apologies from CrowdStrike Leadership
The company also published apologies from its CEO, George Kurtz, and its chief security officer, Shawn Henry. “All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation,” Kurtz said in a message published on the company’s site.
Henry wrote on LinkedIn, “We failed you, and I’m deeply sorry for that.”
“I’ve been in my professional life for almost 40 years, and my North Star has always been to ‘protect good people from bad things,’” Henry wrote. “The past two days have been the most challenging 48 hours for me over 12+ years. The confidence we built in drips over the years was lost in buckets within hours, and it was a gut punch.”
