CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

‘ 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the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”’

This is definitely worse than no gift card. Insulting. A general maxim: When something is a big deal, your response should make a bigger deal out of it than the complaints. $10 says "We don't think this matters." Now watch as everyone explains precisely why it does. PR 101 fail.

This reminds me of something that happened at a former employer. After I had been employed there for a couple of years, someone in HR or Legal noticed that the programmers had never signed any "our code belongs to the company" agreement. So they asked us to sign a paper to that effect, and gave us each a check for $20. My thought was that I always assumed the company owned this code, but if they were going to pay for it, then $20 was waaaay too little. Anyway I took the $20, signed the paper, and got back to work. But it always gave me a chuckle.

This reminds me of the family who was awarded $4 in damages for a wrongful death suit. [0] It's almost worse than nothing.

[0] https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2018/06/01/jury-awards-family-f...

Huh, so, not only clueless at security, but also clueless at customer relations. Also, their commercials are stupid, so clueless at marketing.

I find it funny that their name, CrowdStrike, sounds like an anti-personnel reaper drone. Now metaphorically fits.

It's a deliciously insulting amount because it's not quite enough for a meal on Uber Eats.

A girl I went to school with in the American South is now a reporter in the Midwest. She was supposed to go home for a brief visit to see her family, but Delta canceled her flight due to the CrowdStrike outage. A few days later her father was murdered by a disgruntled customer while working at his jewelry store in their hometown.

What an awful coincidence. I can’t even imagine how it must feel to have a freak technical accident deprive you of seeing your father for the last time.

Think about this: Someone came up with that idea. A group of people probably approved it. Someone else had to purchase those cards or set up the job to send them to customers.

At no point did anyone think "this doesn't seem like the right response, I should warn someone further up the chain". Probably due to the idea coming from further up the chain.

And those ubereats/doordash/grubhub cards are worthless because $10 won't get you a thing, you'll need to spend another $30. Which is why corporate always buys those because I am guessing they're much less than $10 to buy.

What an utter clown strike.

This has to be a prank or a joke to further make CrowdStrike look bad, probably for stock reasons.

I just don't immediately believe a publicly-traded company with this many users does something this stupid.

I think the closest level of Brand disaster in our times would be the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

In that case, BP basically threw away their consumer brand in the US - they turned every single BP station into an Arco station (their subsidiary, "lower quality" brand at the time). Then they sold off or spun down a huge portion of their businesses to set aside money for legal fees.

I don't know if Crowdstrike really has any other options at this point. The amount of legal liability the company is going to be under will be staggering and the brand reputation is worse than worthless.

Many years ago I worked at a financial company that offered various investment opportunities to customers.

Which was based on cold calling people who in general did not need them and telling them they did.

(I was young and innocent at the time, and I didn't figure this out right away) (I had not even seen boilerroom)

I worked in IT. We created a fantastic tool (it really was) that managed the entire process.

You could put someone in front of a screen, given them a phone and the software would guide them.

1. Name, address, number to call. 2. Script for selling, whith branches depending on how the conversations was going. Obviously we could only cover small subsets of possible paths. (but it was reasonably good, since the conversations tended to be much the same)

Let us say the conversation went well. In order to make the sale, a number of government and financial forms had to be filled out,

3. Highly guided and simplified data entry that would at the end of the process cause all forms and documents to be issued.

4. As part of the process prompts for specific things the customer had to be told to be in compliance

5. Documents go out by Fedex.

(then some boring stuff)

The concept was that you could take someone off the street, who had no training or understanding of the product or financial matters etc etc, put a phone in front of then start the software and bang.

The reason I have bored you dear reader with all of that is coming up.

At Christmas bonuses were paid out. People in sales got some huge $$$$$ cash bonuses and there were some expensive gifts in there as well. Including a horse,.

Makes sense.

The IT department... We got coupons for 50% off at Heavenly Ham. (or something like that).

We were not amused.

Curious who gets one. Like, a big company (airline, bank, etc) that had to hand touch 10,000+ devices across the world.

Crowdstrike is sending what? Like 15 $10 cards to the little area in IT that handles desktops/kiosks/atms/etc? Or the to the Cyber area that bought it, but mostly wasn't saddled with fixing the issue?

Does that mean Delta Airlines received a single $10 gift card? This must be fake news, it makes no sense.

This demonstrates that the same post-commit checks and tests that were lacking in the product also exist within the marketing department.

This is a[nother] highly unserious move and unforced error.

Delta Air Lines is going to have some trouble dividing that...

Well, I'm not a CrowdStrike customer, so I'm not entitled to any gift cards anyway, and I'll refrain from asking snarky questions like "is that per organization, per affected PC, or per minute of wasted support time?"

Instead, let me offer the following, alternative snark: "If I were to share with you the secret of renaming your C-*.sys files to C-*.tmp prior to trying to ingest them, so that if you crash while doing so, you will not repeat that mistake right after rebooting, how many US$10 gift cards is that worth? Keeping in mind, of course, that is, like, 2 hours of parking where I live?"

ClownStrike really earning their moniker.

As if a $10 gift card is anywhere near compensating enough for people impacted by their incompetence. Some people were impacted by delayed flights. Some people were impacted by degraded medical care.

This is so wild that it must be a prank. But if it's real, then I guess whoever is in charge of CrowdStrike's PR is as incompetent as their CTO.

Distributing $10 gift cards is so obviously wrong I can't even comprehend how it was approved.

I wonder how much money in total they represent, and if CrowdStrike would have come out better saying "We've immediately allocated $X amount of funds to making sure this issue won't happen again" instead of dividing in x * $10 uber eats insults.

UBER Eats Gift Card :(

I would what cold hard cash, plus I do not want to put a sypware app on my phone for just $10.

There was a musician in my town who passed a hat after each show, and he said, "put in whatever you wouldn't be embarrassed to accept if someone gave it to you."

I can see someone thinking $10 was a nice idea, but letting the impact settle a bit before narrative reingagement would have seemed wiser. Interesting to think about what to do instead though. Thought of discounts on renewals or account credits, but anything that seems like bargaining is going to get flak. In terms of who was really affected by the outages, maybe demonstrate recognition by donating to a PTSD or family support charity. wonder what thinking of each customer is a person in a family would do to tech product decisions in general.

Well I find the gesture really nice. 10 USD per node that went into a boot loop, this will be a very, very good dinner for the team who worked on the recovery, for years to come. Not sure why everyone is complaining.

Definitely not some phishing attempt?

This gives me early career PTSD. I once reduced monthly operating cost by six figures and the company responded by buying the office a pizza from Sam's Club as a reward.

This reads like an article from the Onion, bravo CrowdStrike.

People are giving them grief, but you have to realize that the cost of $10 gift cards for all billion or more affected people on the planet, would quickly add up.

Also (not a joke): intermediate vendors should seriously be preparing audited "CrowdStrike free" certificates at this point.

Valid to be spent only on CrowdStrike FunBucks™.

What is suspicious about high usage rates?

It seems to me that this is what happens when you have nobody in leadership who can do crisis management.

First thing you do in a crisis? Take a few breaths and calm down. Take the pressure off of yourself. Agree to a timeline and start gathering ideas. Brainstorm. Engage in risk assessment. Then decide, act, and re-evaluate.

How many people they indirectly killed, I saw somewhere number around 1000? Based on amount they are/were going to splash for it, one can calculate cost of human life to them (not even going into other damages). That company ain't even funny anymore.

What fraction of the reporting is "CrowdStrike" versus "CloudStrike"? The first reporting I heard was "CloudStrike", but the company appears to be "CrowdStrike".

Lol I wouldn't know this because I don't have any meal delivery app services near me but I suspect that $10 barely covers the taxes/fees/tip for a meal via Uber Eats

This is the greatest. Who authorized this redemption strategy? Please walk them to the door. If it was the CEO - I'm sure they are already figuring out their exit.

No big deal. Crowdstrike is a poor company. Not much value to leverage. New company takes over and inserts their superior product. And bring value to their company.

Just remember the CS SEO was MacAfee's CTO that bricked tons of windows PCs in 2010 and that crashed their business, leading to Intel buying them out.

When are lawsuits going to start? If I was Delta CEO or a Hospital CEO or any other huge company or country affected by this, I would be fuming.

Hope they were careful about what organisations and what countries this went out to because this could technically be considered a bribe.

How much can you really get with $10 on Uber Eats? Would I have to put in my own money for it to be worth it?

We got a very sophisticated Amazon gift card scam delivered by the post. Be wary!

Maybe these can be given to the lawyers who (hopefully) sue them into the ground.

Hahaha Very Very funny

Our company has already paid a lawyer to get our lost money back

If I'm ever part of a company that causes an outage like this I will resign immediately and offer to help as a consultant for an immediate 5-figure cash retainer. I can't imagine how many devs at CS likely went into full overdrive and aren't getting paid for it.

Can you even buy anything with a $10 gift card these days? Maybe a coffee?

reminds me of time an AI startup offered me a $50 gift card to do something for them. a $50k contract would have been more appropriate. I told them to take a hike (diplomatically worded.)

$10 Uber Eats gift card? What a laughable gesture.

4 billion dollar+ outage... $10 at a time (joy emoji) (clown emoji)

More likely a phishing attempt, or TechCrunch got trolled.

So, about twice what you'd get in a class action.

Wow. So extremely tone deaf.

They're trying to use the equivalent of "pizzas for everyone who works late for this crunch!", and consider the matter closed.

That's really not going to work.

Just a day or two ago I saw someone else comment jokingly about $50 gift cards. The reality turned out to be even more pathetic.

Let them eat gift cards

10$ you can almost afford mcdonalds meal lol

There should be no such business as EDR software. We, as a society are worse off with that concept than would be without.

"Sorry for causing you billions of dollars in damages...here's a cookie as an apology!"

One malware company gives a gift card for another malware company. Fitting.

So now its dereference a null uber eats code?!

And this is why those corporate PR people make the big bucks /s

╰( ^o^)╮ CrowdStrike forwarded me a VERY SLICK refer a friend code that got me a $5 cash bonus no questions asked and them a little something something too for registering a new Cash App account today! $$$ ╰( ^o^)╮

So cool much appreciated CS ~~ good lookin out ! I even beat my coworker to the code he was so mad lol

Now $10 on Uber Eats? Hope I can redeem that code before one of you losers does… Last one there is a rotten egg!

So randooom heheh aww we like to have fun . My boss is so mad that we had no production for 20 hours, but stuff happens what can you do D;