What you need to know
- CrowdStrike was responsible for one of the largest Internet outages in history.
- The company acknowledged its role in the outage and its CEO issued an apology, though that statement only came after backlash.
- CrowdStrike sent $10 Uber Eats gift cards to its partners to apologize for the situation.
- Some of the codes do not work, showing error messages instead of adding $10 to a person's balance.
It turns out CrowdStrike can't even serve humble pie correctly. Following one of the largest IT outages in history, CrowdStrike sent out $10 Uber Eats codes to affected customers. That apology may come off as insufficient considering the millions of dollars lost by some businesses, but the amount isn't the only issue with the restitution. Some of the codes sent out by CrowdStrike don't work, instead showing an error message. CrowdStrike customers have become accustomed to error messages at this point, so the apology is fitting, albeit ironic.
Word of the broken Uber Eats codes comes courtesy of TechCrunch, which received an email from a source who had been offered a gift card. "And for that, we send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience," said the email sent to TechCrunch. "To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!"
CrowdStrike also said it recognized the "additional work that the July 19 incident has caused."
While the Uber Eats codes appear to have worked for some affected by the outage, as shared on X, some of the codes are broken. TechCrunch tried to redeem its code and saw a message stating the gift card "has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid."
CrowdStrike claims that the Uber Eats gift cards do not work because "Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates." CrowdStrike is familiar with issues cause by other companies being blamed on the wrong party, since many wrongly referred to the CrowdStrike outage as the "Microsoft outage." There's a good chance Microsoft was more damaged by the incorrect labeling than CrowdStrike will be hurt by some Uber Eats gift cards not working.
READ MORE: Best CrowdStrike outage memes
CrowdStrike's Chief Security Officer Shawn Henry shared an apology on LinkedIn earlier this week, though it was not well received by many who posted comments replying to the message.
"10$ gift shows how much you are disconnected as Chief Office from your teams and values. 10$ gift is the kind of gift that is worse than not saying anything," said Georgian Pirvu in response to Henry's post.
CrowdStrike Outage
The recent outage caused by CrowdStrike was one of the worst in global history. Millions of computers were affected, which in turn likely affected billions of people. Planes were grounded, banks were affected, and emergency services were down in some areas.
The outage was caused by a faulty CrowdStrike kernel driver. While CrowdStrike was at fault for shipping the bug, it was millions of PCs running Windows that showed the infamous "Blue Screen of Death" (BSoD). CrowdStrike and Microsoft have shipped fixes for the issue, and Microsoft has a CrowdStrike recovery tool, but it will take time for affected systems to be patched.
A former Microsoft software engineer named Dave Plummer has an extensive video breaking down the CrowdStrike situation.
At one point, Microsoft recommended restarting devices up to 15 times to speed up recovery. Perhaps restarting the Uber Eats app 15 times will make the $10 codes sent by CrowdStrike work.
