What do you do when you fuck up on a global scale, throwing airports, tech companies, and government agencies into chaos, and spurring the Blue Screen of Death on devices throughout the world? Well, if you’re cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, you apparently offer your impacted partners a free coffee.
CrowdStrike brought mayhem to the digital world last week when a misconfigured software update crashed millions of computers that were running one of the company’s security products. On Wednesday, the company published a blog detailing what had happened.
Now, the company seems to be trying to apologize. TechCrunch reported Wednesday that CrowdStrike partners were being offered a $10 UberEats gift card to make up for the massive amounts of trouble it had caused. Crowdstrike has a partnership program, Accelerate, which extends ties to a broad variety of security firms and organizations, including MSSPs, telecoms, and cloud platforms. Presumably, many of these companies suffered outages last week when the company’s security platform, Falcon, went down.
“We send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience,” reads a purported screenshot of one of the emails that circulated on X. “To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!” the message continues, providing a QR code for UberEats order redemption.
While a flimsy gift certificate is ostensibly better than nothing, I want to point out that food delivery is expensive as fuck these days and $10 is barely going to cover the taxes and the tip for an order—so you can probably count out any “late-night snack” orders. That leaves coffee as the only viable option. But, like, who orders coffee via UberEats?
To make matters worse, the vouchers don’t work. TechCrunch reported that some web users who originally posted about receiving the gift cards were complaining that they were receiving error messages when they attempted to cash them. When the outlet attempted to duplicate the issue, they similarly received an error message that said the card had “been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”
CrowdStrike responded to Gizmodo’s request for comment with a confirmation that the cards don’t work. “CrowdStrike did not send gift cards to customers or clients,” a spokesperson said. “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.”
I guess that tracks. Push out a software update that doesn’t work and, then, when it crashes computer systems worldwide, push out a gift card that also doesn’t work. At least they’re consistent.
