What do you do when you screw up on a global scale, throwing airports, tech companies, and government agencies into chaos, and causing blue screens of death on devices around the world? Well, if you’re the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, you apparently offer affected partners a free cup of coffee.
CrowdStrike brought chaos to the digital world last week when a misconfigured software update crashed millions of computers running the company’s security products. On Wednesday, the company published a blog detailing what happened.
Now, the company appears to be trying to apologize. TechCrunch reported on Wednesday that CrowdStrike partners will receive a $10 UberEats gift card for the massive inconvenience it caused. Crowdstrike has a partner program called Accelerate that extends connections to a variety of security companies and organizations, including MSSPs, telecoms, and cloud platforms. Many of these companies supposedly experienced outage last week when the company’s security platform, Falcon, went down.
“We sincerely appreciate and apologize for the inconvenience,” a screenshot of an email circulating on QR codes for UberEats order redemption will continue to be provided.
While on the surface a flimsy gift certificate is better than nothing, I’d like to point out that food delivery is so expensive these days that $10 barely covers tax and order tip – so you can figure out any “late” gift certificate. This leaves coffee as the only viable option. But who wants to order coffee through UberEats?
To make matters worse, the coupons don’t work. TechCrunch reports that some online users who initially posted about receiving gift cards complained that they received error messages when trying to redeem them. When the store tried to repeat the issue, they also received an error message stating that the card “has been canceled by the card issuer and is no longer valid.”
CrowdStrike responded to Gizmodo’s request for comment, confirming that the cards don’t work. “CrowdStrike does not send gift cards to customers or clients,” a spokesperson said. “We did send these messages to our teammates and partners who had been helping customers through this. Due to the high usage, Uber flagged this as fraudulent.
I guess that’s the trajectory. Push out a software update that doesn’t work, and then, when it crashes computer systems around the world, push out a gift card that doesn’t work either. At least they’re consistent.
