CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers with a botched update all over the world 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, as well as a source who also received one.

On Tuesday, a source told TechCrunch that 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. The same email was also posted on X by someone else. “To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!”

A screenshot of the email sent to partners by CrowdStrike after the July 19 incident. Image Credits: TechCrunch / supplied

The email was sent from a CrowdStrike email address in the name of Daniel Bernard, the company’s chief business officer, according to a screenshot of the email seen by TechCrunch. According to one post on X, in the United Kingdom the voucher was worth £7.75, or roughly $10 at today’s exchange rate.

On Wednesday, some of the 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 TechCrunch 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the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”

CrowdStrike did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Friday, CrowdStrike released a faulty update that rendered around 8.5 million Windows devices unusable, according to Microsoft. 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 that is shown when Windows crashes or cannot load because of a critical software failure.

The outage caused delays at airports in Amsterdam, Berlin, Dubai, and London, and across the United States. It also caused several hospitals to halt surgeries, and paralyzed countless businesses all over the world.

Do you have more information about the CrowdStrike outage? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email. You also can contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.

Since the outage began on Friday, CrowdStrike has regularly published updates on its efforts to figure out what caused the mass outage. In an update on Wednesday, the company said that because of a bug during the process to check that updates are ready to be released to customer devices, the faulty code “passed validation despite containing problematic content data.”

The company also published apologies from its CEO George Kurtz, as well as 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. “Nothing is more important to me than the trust and confidence that our customers and partners have put into CrowdStrike. As we resolve this incident, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.”

Henry wrote on Linkedin that “we failed you, and for that I’m deeply sorry.”

“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.”

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