CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers with a botched update all over the world last week, is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, according to several people who say they received the gift card, as well as a source who also received one.
On Wednesday, some of the people who posted about the gift card said that when they went to redeem the offer, they got an error message saying the voucher had been canceled. When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”
On Friday, CrowdStrike released a faulty update that rendered around 8.5 million Windows devices unusable, according to Microsoft. The update caused the affected computers to be stuck at the infamous “blue screen of death,” or BSOD, a bright blue error screen with a message that is shown when Windows crashes or cannot load because of a critical software failure.
The outage caused delays at airports in Amsterdam, Berlin, Dubai, and London, and across the United States. It also caused several hospitals to halt surgeries, and paralyzed countless businesses all over the world.
$10 wouldn’t even cover 10 minutes of admin time to fix the problem. It’s honestly a bigger insult than nothing or just flipping the bird.
It also wouldn’t cover a meal from Uber Eats.
Definitely worse than nothing.
Especially since it’s a gift card not money
A sandwich is $12-15 these days. That doesn’t even include the service fee or the driver’s tip.
Not to mention this “apology” has profit for Uber built into it. Or serves as a marketing campaign for them, depending on what kind of deal they offered them to use Uber gift cards for this.
Like with $10 not even being enough to order much of anything, Uber could probably still come out ahead of they offered them at less than half of the “face value”. I regularly get offers for more than $10 off other food delivery services just to sign up, so I wouldn’t even rule out Uber offering to do this for free just for the marketing.
Like I ignore those other offers but had to think about this one before I realized it was just as ignorable because the idea of it being “compensation” made it seem more worthwhile than a marketing giveaway would be.
Plus, I bet there’s an agreement to not sue baked into this offer.
I just got hit with a really weird edge case and just barely resolved a 2 day 911 to recover. During this time we likely spent at least 10 million and that’s not even the primary incident.