People are in disbelief at gift CrowdStrike sent in response to global outage
People are in disbelief over CrowdStrike’s gift after the global outage threw the world into chaos.
The unprecedented Microsoft IT outage grounded flights and took TV stations offline around the globe.
It affected much of the world’s infrastructure including hospitals, banks and supermarkets - affecting 8.5 million computers.
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Issues were reported in many countries including the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and India.
There were initial concerns that the outage could have been caused by a cyber attack but UK government officials revealed that they were not aware of any hostile involvement and are not treating it as an attack.
Eventually, the cause of the problems became clear and it was unveiled that they had originated from a faulty update to one of global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike‘s products.
On the issue, CrowdStrike said that it was “aware of reports of crashes on Windows... relating to the Falcon sensor,” which is a software that monitors computers.
Since then, the company has faced more backlash for how they thanked their staff who worked during the outage.
The firm gave employees and firms they work with a $10 UberEats voucher "to express their gratitude" for staff after the chaos caused during the issue.
In an email to their partners, CrowdStrike wrote: “To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!”
The email directed people to a code to access the $10 voucher.
However, the gesture seems to have fallen flat.
Taking to Reddit to share their thoughts, one user wrote: “I genuinely thought the $10 voucher was some troll mocking CrowdStrike and playing a prank on them. I can't believe it was actually real and that it also failed.”
A second said: “Ten bucks is not even enough to buy a McDonald's meal and they thought it was good enough for the lost weekend and billions of dollars lost from business big and small.”
A third added: “How daft and tone deaf to offer that?”
"This voucher has been cancelled by the issuing party"
A fourth wrote: “You know they probably agonized over that decision, too. Someone probably suggested $20 and it got haggled down lol.”
And a fifth person had their own theory on why the vouchers were sent out, adding: “If you ‘accepted our payout’ for the mistake by redeeming the gift card, you can't sue for damages.”
To make matters worse, some people have taken to social media to say that the voucher didn’t even work.
Taking to X, formerly Twitter, one user claimed that they had received a message saying: “We're sorry, this voucher has been cancelled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”
In a statement, CrowdStrike said: “That claim is false. CrowdStrike did not send gift cards to customers or clients. We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation. Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates.”