What do you do when a global fiasco wreaks havoc on airports, tech companies and government agencies, causing blue screens of death on devices around the world? Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike seems to offer free coffee to affected partners.
CrowdStrike wreaked havoc on the digital world last week when a misconfigured software update caused millions of computers running its security products to crash. The company published a blog on Wednesday detailing what happened.
Now, it seems the company is trying to apologize. TechCrunch reported on Wednesday that CrowdStrike’s partners will be offered $10 UberEats gift cards to make up for all the trouble the company caused them. Crowdstrike has a partnership program called Accelerate that has expanded its work with a range of security companies and organizations, including MSSPs, telcos and cloud platforms. Presumably, many of these companies were affected when the company’s security platform, Falcon, went down last week.
“We sincerely appreciate and apologize for any inconvenience caused,” reads the email, which appears to be a screenshot of an email circulated by X. “As a token of our appreciation, we’ll treat you to your next coffee or late-night snack!” the message continues, including a QR code to redeem your Uber Eats order.
A flimsy gift card is better than nothing, but food delivery is insanely expensive these days, and $10 barely covers tax and tip, so that probably rules out ordering a “midnight snack.” That leaves coffee as your only option. But who orders coffee through UberEats?
To make matters worse, the vouchers don’t work: TechCrunch reported that some web users who originally posted that they received the gift cards have complained that they get an error message when they try to cash them in. When the outlet tried to replicate the issue, it similarly got an error message saying the card had been “canceled by issuer and is invalid.”
In response to Gizmodo’s request for comment, CrowdStrike confirmed that the cards don’t work. “CrowdStrike does not send gift cards to customers or clients,” a spokesperson said. “We do send them to teammates and partners who are helping customers through this situation. Uber has flagged this as a scam due to high usage.”
Well, I suppose you’re right: release a software update that doesn’t work, crashes computer systems around the world, then release a gift card that also doesn’t work. At least you’re consistent.
