CrowdStrike faces backlash over 10 dollar apology vouchers for IT outage
The firm has offered the voucher to staff and partners who helped it respond to the global IT outage last week.
Your support helps us to tell the story
This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.
The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.
Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike is facing new criticism after offering a ten dollar UberEats voucher as an apology for the major global IT outage last week which grounded flights and cancelled medical appointments.
A flawed software update from the company impacted around 8.5 million Windows computers worldwide last Friday, bringing businesses and infrastructure to a standstill.
Now the company has been criticised for sending an email to staff and some partners thanking them for their work to help fix the issue which told recipients: “To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!”.
The gesture has been widely mocked on social media, with some suggesting the offer of a cup of coffee did not make up for the thousands of hours of lost work time and the damage done to public trust in the firm.
The scheme has also been blighted by some reporting being unable to redeem the code, with CrowdStrike admitting that Uber later flagged the offering as fraud “because of high usage rates”.
The offer does not appear to have extended to CrowdStrike customers impacted by the outage.
It comes as questions remain over whether any financial compensation will be due to CrowdStrike customers because of the outage, but the cybersecurity firm has pledged to improve its software testing procedures in the wake of the incident.
In a published review of the outage, CrowdStrike said a bug in its system meant “problematic content data” in a software update file was missed.
The US firm has also been asked to schedule an appearance before Congress, with chief executive George Kurtz asked to give evidence about the incident to US legislators.