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What do you do if you push out a software update that causes a huge chunk of the planet's IT infrastructure to grind to a halt? If your name is CrowdStrike, apparently that involves offering $10 UberEats gift vouchers — some of which don’t actually seem to be working (via TechCrunch).
For those that don’t know, the CrowdStrike outage started on July 19, with Windows machines across the world crashing and being sent into an infinite boot loop — and a perpetual Blue Screen of Death. This was caused by a CrowdStrike software update, which could then only be fixed by manually deleting certain files from each individual machine. Needless to say, the cleanup was a huge undertaking.
Article continues belowOne post on X noted that this voucher was worth £7.75, or around $10, while others reported that they received error messages during redemption — claiming that the vouchers had been canceled and were no longer valid. Oh boy.
You may be thinking that this could be the work of opportunistic scammers, trying to take advantage of the situation with the promise of gift cards. But CrowdStrike did confirm to TechCrunch that they were the ones that sent out the gift cards, claiming that “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.”
So this story isn’t going to be going anywhere anytime soon, even if the damage itself seems to be mostly over. We can only hope that CrowdStrike doesn’t continue to make things worse with token gestures that are, frankly, worse than nothing.
More from Tom's Guide
- CrowdStrike CEO called to testify over disastrous global outage as as Microsoft points finger at EU
- What is CrowdStrike and what do they have to do with the global IT outage?
- I asked Copilot vs Gemini to explain the massive CrowdStike outage
