CrowdStrike Issues $10 Vouchers to Apologize for the Microsoft Outage: But They Don’t Work

• CrowdStrike issued $10 gift cards to all its partners on Tuesday to apologize for the global Microsoft outage.
• However, when some people tried to redeem the voucher on Wednesday, they got an error message saying it was no longer valid.
• CrowdStrike spokesperson Kevin Benacci believes that owing to the high usage rates of this voucher, Uber might have flagged it as fraud and canceled it.

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company whose faulty update caused one of the biggest Microsoft outages ever, is trying to make up for it by offering its partners a $10 (roughly 7.75) UberEats gift card as an apology.

The news was confirmed by an inside source who received the gift card and an email from the company, authored by Daniel Bernard, the company's chief business officer. CrowdStrike wrote that it recognizes the additional work the July 19 incident has caused.

And for that, we send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience. To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late-night snack is on us!' - CrowdStrike email

However, when some users tried to redeem the voucher on Wednesday, they received an error message saying that the voucher had been canceled.

To this, CrowdStrike spokesperson Kevin Benacci said they indeed sent out gift vouchers to their partners who helped them through this catastrophic event.

However, due to the high usage rates of the voucher, Uber flagged it as fraud and canceled it.

CrowdStrike is currently working with Uber to solve the issue and users might have to wait a bit for the vouchers to become live again.

About the Outage

On July 19, millions of Microsoft users around the world were unable to log into their system. Every time they tried, they were met with a blue error screen.

What seemed like an individual problem soon turned out to be a global IT issue affecting multiple countries such as the US UK, India, Japan, Australia, and many more.

It turns out that while CrowdStrike was updating its software, the update file had a bug that crashed Microsoft's systems.

• The impact was disastrous and more than 8.5 million devices were impacted. Flights had to be canceled or delayed, airports were crowded.
• Supermarkets were unable to process card payments and pharmacies and hospitals had a tough time pulling up patient data.
• Cybercriminals also jumped at the opportunity and launched various phishing attacks, pretending to be the CrowdStrike customer support team.
• The insurance industry is also expected to see a dip, as experts expect businesses to file Business Interruption Claims in huge numbers, leading to losses to the insurance sector.

According to Insurer Parametrix, the outage resulted in $5.4 billion in losses for the 25% of US Fortune 500 companies that were affected, and around $15 billion for other companies globally.

Now, making up for these losses with $10 vouchers may seem like a cruel joke to most, especially when the vouchers don't seem to be working. It will be interesting to see if CrowdStike would come with a genuine gesture of apology.

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