Tone-Deaf CrowdStrike Apologizes For Global Outage With $10 Uber Eats Gift Cards
CrowdStrike has been on the defensive since July 19 when a bad update rolled out to the company's Falcon Sensor security tool. Falcon Sensor is intended to detect and neutralize malware and network intrusions in real-time, but it needs unrestricted low-level access to Windows in order to do that. The bad update introduced a flaw in CrowdStrike's kernel driver, which led to an irreversible blue screen of death (BSOD) on affected systems. The only fix is to manually revert the bad update, which can mean gaining access to a system that was tucked away in an inconvenient location under the assumption that it could be managed remotely.
Earlier this week, CrowdStrike began sending out apologetic emails to some of its partners. As compensation for the "inconvenience" caused by millions of crashed PCs, the company offered a whopping $10 for Uber Eats in the form of a virtual gift card. No, not $10 per employee—just $10. Some people who tried to redeem the codes found that they didn't even work. The vouchers were subsequently canceled by Uber because it believed the high rate of redemption was evidence of fraud, reports TechCrunch. CrowdStrike just can't catch a break.
As CrowdStrike bumbles through its mea culpa, it is also releasing details on the failures that led to the bad update's release. The firm now says that a bug in its quality control system, as well as insufficient testing, led to the outage. Experts who have reviewed CrowdStrike's initial report have expressed shock that it was not policy to install updates on a physical Windows machine for testing. There will undoubtedly be a reckoning at CrowdStrike in the coming months, but first it has to get through this crisis without further insulting its customers.
The poor souls responsible for fixing these millions of systems have been crawling through server racks, climbing ladders, and digging around in piles of poorly managed cables to access all these computers. CrowdStrike apparently knows enough to be aware that the outage has been a huge pain for IT staff. It does not, however, understand that a $10 gift card is an insulting apology.
Top image via Smishra1, CC4.0.
