The cybersecurity startup, CrowdStrike, is offering a gift card to its partners as an apology for adding more work to their already heavy workload during last week’s major worldwide digital outage that brought down whole industries.
This is based on multiple individuals who attest to receiving the gift card and a source who did as well.
An official from CrowdStrike verified to Business Insider that the vouchers were delivered to partners of the company, who are involved in the Accelerate Program and handle and sell CrowdStrike on behalf of clients.
“CrowdStrike did not send gift cards to customers or clients,” the spokesperson said. “We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation. Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates.”
Recall that last Friday, a global computer outage triggered by a defective CrowdStrike software update grounded tens of thousands of aircraft and disrupted banks, hospitals, and other businesses.
According to cloud monitoring and insurance company Parametrix, downtime resulted in an estimated loss of $5.4 billion for Fortune 500 companies.
However, CrowdStrike is facing further criticism after offering a $10 UberEats ticket to employees and businesses it works with to apologise for a global IT failure that caused mayhem across airlines, banks, and hospitals last week.
But the gesture was greeted by derision by some. One Reddit user branded it an “absolute clown show” while another said: “I literally wanted to drive my car off a bridge this weekend and they bought me coffee. Nice.”
One LinkedIn user claiming to be a CrowdStrike partner, said: “The gesture of a cup of coffee or Uber Eats credit as an apology doesn’t seem to make up for the tens of thousands lost in man hours and customer trust due to the July 19 incident.”
We earlier reported that the United States House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee has written to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, requesting that he speak on last week’s global IT outage.
