CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that last week took down millions of computers worldwide with a buggy update, is offering $10 Uber Eats gift cards to its partners as an apology, according to multiple people who said they received the gift cards and a source who received them.
On Tuesday, a source told TechCrunch that they received an email from CrowdStrike saying the company was offering the gift cards because it acknowledged that “the incident on July 19th caused additional work.”
“We sincerely appreciate this and apologize for any inconvenience,” the email said, according to a screenshot shared by the source. The same email was also posted to X by someone else: “As a thank you, your next coffee or late-night snack will be free!”
According to a screenshot of the email seen by TechCrunch, the email was sent under the name of the company’s chief business officer, Daniel Bernard. According to a post on X, the voucher is worth £7.75 in the UK, or about $10 at today’s exchange rate.
Some of those who posted about the gift card on Wednesday said they received an error message when they tried to redeem the offer, saying the voucher had been canceled. When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page showed an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”
CrowdStrike did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Friday, CrowdStrike released a faulty update that, according to Microsoft, disabled approximately 8.5 million Windows devices. The affected computers were stuck in the infamous “Blue Screen of Death,” or BSOD, a bright blue error screen with a message that appears when Windows crashes or cannot load due to a serious software error.
The outage caused delays at airports in Amsterdam, Berlin, Dubai, London and across the United States. It also forced several hospitals to halt operations and shut down numerous businesses around the world.
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Do you have more information about the CrowdStrike outage? You can securely contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai on Signal at +1 917 257 1382 from a non-work device, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or by email. You can also contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.
Since the outage began on Friday, CrowdStrike has posted regular updates about its efforts to determine the cause of the massive outage. In an update on Wednesday, the company said a bug was introduced during the process of verifying that an update was ready to be released to customer devices, causing incorrect code to “pass validation despite containing problematic content data.”
The company also issued apologies from CEO George Kurtz and Chief Security Officer Sean Henry.
“Everyone at CrowdStrike understands the severity and impact of this situation,” Kurtz said in a message posted to the company’s site. “What’s most important to me is the trust and confidence our customers and partners have placed in CrowdStrike. As we resolve this incident, I want to make it clear that we will provide full transparency into how this incident occurred and the steps we are taking to ensure that something like this never happens again.”
“We have let you down and for that we sincerely apologize,” Henry wrote on LinkedIn.
“I’ve been in the business for almost 40 years and my North Star has always been ‘Protecting Good People from Bad Things,’” Henry wrote. “The last two days have been the hardest 48 hours I’ve had in over 12 years. The confidence I’ve built up over the years has been emptied in a bucket in a matter of hours, and it’s been a huge hit to the gut.”
