CrowdStrike faces backlash over 10 dollar apology vouchers for IT outage

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

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.