"To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!"

Free Snacks

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm behind last week's epic global computer meltdown — seemingly the largest IT outage in history — is offering its partners a hilariously inadequate mea culpa: a $10 Uber Eats gift card in apology.

It's a hilariously inadequate gesture for a slip-up that cost Fortune 500 companies more than $5 billion in direct losses, according to a new analysis by insurance firm Parametrix, and forced countless IT professionals to work around the clock over the weekend.

An unnamed source told TechCrunch that they had received an email with the amended gift card to make up for the "additional work that the July 19 incident has caused."

"And for that, we send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience," the email signed by CrowdStrike's chief business officer Daniel Bernard read. "To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!"

Blue Screen

Adding insult to injury, at least some of the gift cards were "canceled by the issuing party" and were "no longer valid," according to TechCrunch.

The gigantic outage was caused by a faulty software update issued by CrowdStrike for its Falcon threat detection software, which is run by millions of computers around the world.

As a result, Windows machines started crashing and experiencing blue screens of death, bringing down entire airlines, airports, hospitals, banks, and broadcasters.

IT professionals were forced to jump in in person to address the issue. In a note issued by Microsoft last week, the company advised rebooting devices as many as 15 times.

According to a Wednesday update, CrowdStrike admitted that it had released a "problematic Rapid Response Content configuration update" that "resulted in a Windows system crash."

Meanwhile, the company's CEO George Kurtz — noticeably agitated by the chaos unleashed by his company — has made several TV appearances to calm investors.

"All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation," Kurtz wrote in a statement.

Given the disastrous extent of the damage, CrowdStrike's tone-deaf $10 vouchers are unlikely to make up for what must've been an exhausting and frustrating weekend for IT workers.

The incident could also end up being a make-or-break moment for the company. Shares are down over 30 percent over the last month.

"The past two days have been the most challenging 48 hours for me over 12+ years," CrowdStrike chief security officer Shawn Henry wrote in a LinkedIn statement. "The confidence we built in drips over the years was lost in buckets within hours, and it was a gut punch."

More on the implosion: CrowdStrike CEO Visibly Agitated On Camera After Massive Outage


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