Following its triggering of the greatest PC outage in history, estimated by Microsoft to have impacted 8.5 million Windows PCs on the day of reckoning and with early traces hitting Linux systems as far back as April, reports indicate that CrowdStrike is now compensating its partners for the damages done...with vouchers for $10 gift cards to be redeemed on UberEats.
Per a report from TechCrunch and corroborated by scattered Twitter reports, CrowdStrike's apology tour has gotten off to an already-controversial start, not the least of which because $10 doesn't feel like adequate compensation for the individual employees impacted by this outage, much less entire companies. Additional reports point toward some or all of the vouchers having already been canceled, with the message spat back to parties saying the gift card has "been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid."
So, while several parties report receiving this apology from CrowdStrike, some of those people also report that it doesn't work. A screenshot of a supposed CrowdStrike email supplied to TechCrunch said the following:
"Dear CrowdStrike Partners,
We recognize the additional work that the July 19 incident as caused. And for that, we send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience.
The impacted version of the channel file 291 was added to Falcon's known-bad list in the CrowdStrike Cloud. We also improved some of our cloud services to dramatically speed up their ability to make rapid communication to the sensor. No sensor updates, new channel files, or code was deployed from the CrowdStrike Cloud.
As many of you have been proactive in assisting your customers with recovery and remediation services, we want to ensure that you have access to the latest information, tools, and resources. Our centralized Remediation Hub is where you can find the latest updates, resources, and best practices for remediation.
Please also be on the lookout for our Preliminary Incident Review (PIR) which will be published soon.
To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late snack is on us! Access your UberEats credit by using code [omitted]"
While the potential rescinding of UberEats credit may leave a particularly bad taste in the mouth following such an apologetic email, it is worth mentioning that CrowdStrike's market cap plunged by $12.5 billion USD within days of the outage, with its shares down 15% as of July 19 and share prices down to $308. In fact, as of today (July 24), share prices have plummeted even further down to $262 a piece per MarketWatch, so this could all just mean CrowdStrike is no longer in the position to be sending out these free UberEats cards.
