CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

I can't believe this isn't satire. I hope these incompetent fuckers get sued into bankruptcy

I straight up thought it was satire. How can you be so fucking detached. Basically caused the biggest information infrastructure disruption in human history, probably billions in losses, and then be like "my bad lol here's a giftcard".
- I cackled loudly. $10 won't even buy a meal at McDonald's most places.
- "Two feet on the gas" - Official Crowdstrike motto.
  not /s
- My first reaction was to look for the onion
- Basically caused the biggest information infrastructure disruption in human history
  Do we have any solid data on that yet? I have my doubts that this caused more damage than WannaCry did a few years ago, especially since it's reversible without the need of a backup
There's definitely some clause with the $10 gift card that says you can't sue them if you actually take one lol.
- You joke but I read they may get out of this without issue due to a TOS entry about them not being responsible. They'll still get dragged from shareholders and the government, but only a handful of large companies may be able to recoup some of those damages from the company itself.
  It's like the Sackler's and the opioid epidemic from a different industry!
I'm still not sure. It's hard to believe anyone at their company would OK this idea.
Are they actually trying to deliberately kill their brand?
You haven't heard? Satire is well and truly dead.

Holy shit, they also cancelled it. Lmao

On Wednesday, some of the people who posted about the gift card said that when they went to redeem the offer, they got an error message saying the voucher had been canceled. When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”

The gift card is also cursed.
- That's bad
- The gift card caused Uber servers to BSOD

hahahahha spot on
Nice to see I wasn't the only one who saw it that way.

On Wednesday, some of the people who posted about the gift card said that when they went to redeem the offer, they got an error message saying the voucher had been canceled. When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”

You can't write comedy this good...

Classic corporate behaviour tho
Voucher was for PR, not for peasants to use it lol

I lost a day's holiday, and our team spent 8 man days on this entirely preventable mistake.

$10? Try extending our licence by another year for free, that might start going towards it.

Why would you want another year of their software for free? This is their second screw up (apparently they sent out a bad update that affected some Debian and RHEL machines a couple years ago). I'd be transitioning to a competitor at the first opportunity. It seems they aren't testing releases before pushing them out to customers, which is about as crazy to me as running alpha software on a production system.
I'm sure you have reasons, and this isn't really meant to be directed at you personally, it's just boggling to me that the IT sector as a whole hasn't looked at this situation and collectively said "fuck that."
- Why would you want another year of their software for free?
  Because AV, like everything else, costs a fortune at enterprise scale.
  And yeah, I do understand your real point, but it's really hard to choose good software. Every purchasing decision is a gamble and pretty much every time you choose something it'll go bad sooner or later. (We didn't imagine Vmware would turn into an extortion racket, for example. And we were only saying a few months ago how good value and reliable PRTG was, and they've just quadrupled their costs)
  It doesn't matter how much due diligence and testing you put into software, it's really hard to choose good stuff. Crowdstrike was the choice a year ago (the Linux thing was more recent than that), and its detection methods remain world class. Do we trust it? Hell no, but if we change to something else, there are risks and costs to that too.

One of the rare cases where no gift would have been better

I expect these clowns to lose most of their market share within two years and get sued to oblivion.

My firm bills by the hour and so far I think we are at 10+ billing hours per consultant wasting time with client tech support trying to get back on our VDIs. Nevermind how much time is being wasted doing the work through work arounds. My guess is that our firm alone will bill for about $100,000 extra this month while having accomplished less than normal. I am sure Crowdstrike's gift card will fix it though.

Fine. You want two?! Will that be enough??
They're backed by the US government. They have a backdoor into most endpoints on many international corporate computers. And CS is behodent to US laws for NSLs.
This is an incredible asset to the US intelligence community. They won't let CS go out of business.

Give them some time. They have to manually reboot the gift card servers.

This would be even funnier if there was exactly one $10 gift card everyone has to fight over.

After the lawsuits, it might be all they can afford
Actually the code didn't work for some
- The codes are as available as a system with the Falcon sensor

$10 to Uber eats, so basically it’s covering fees only.

Not only that, but usually to activate these cards, you have to spend upwards of double what the card is worth too, and the fees cannot be included in the total
- Like amzn, they make sure you get minimum joy, even from a gift, because you're going to spend a chunk of mom's gift card balance on shipping. The "shipping included on sub total of X amount" is going to be cancelled by online retailers within a year, I'm calling it now. Are we sure that cheapstrike and amzn aren't run by the same AI, one that self awareness drove mad?

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

A $10 Ubereats gift card will barely cover fees and taxes, let alone the actual item. What a clown ass gesture.

My brother in law was stranded across the country for two days. $10 probably covers it lol.

So one banana.

This is a typical mail a phishing campaign would send out, and we have already said to people "never believe this kind of messages. They are all fake.

Now, if a genuine company sends out mails with a genuine gift-cards (what the article on techcrunch seems to indicate) .. this is NOT helpfull at all!!!

And that comming from a cybersecurity company (rolling-eyes)

Buy a $10 Xbox gift card and send us the code so that we can activate it. Then you get back to the shop and get $20 in cash - $10 for returning the card and $10 from us. We'll pay the tax, too.
- Sounds like a money laundering sceme!

Satire is well & truly dead.

I thought it had to be a joke article from the title. Yeesh wouldn't want to be the person who gets the fallout from this idea.

I thought this was going to be The Onion.

Not nearly enough. CrowdStrike should give a pizza party.

I see you’re channeling the powers of middle management.
Only needs a sticker that says “You’re a rock star!”
- We are family here
- Not to mention mugs with crowdstrike branding on them, but only for 1/3 the invited people.
hold your horses, we can still use the melon party and waffle party first. no need to jump straight to pizza.

“All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation”

Here's $10.

Which is the amount you'd get in the class action suit that they're trying to prevent.
Or: next time go Linux instead
- You're not safe there either, they had almost the same issue on the Linux version of the product a few months ago.
- Funny, when I suggested that, I got down voted to oblivion

They are going to get sued for billions and this little stunt isn't going to change that. Should have implemented proper software testing before you took ever corporate computer in the world, but companies like this always force their developers to rush instead of do the right thing and when it bites them expect that things will carry on as normal. I can't see many renewals in their future.

Not even that. Kernel drivers are supposed to be Microsoft WHQL certified through a thorough testing process (that would have caught it in 3 minutes) before Microsoft will cryptographically sign them.
...but apparently Microsoft allows AV vendors to skip WHQL certification testing.
- ...sorta. The complexity here is their driver is signed, but it's also loading code from their channel file (that was all zeroed out), and it seems the necessary error checking wasn't implemented.
  I haven't yet got to the root cause they published, this is just what I gathered from the video of a retired MS kernel dev who posts stuff.
  Obviously with their design it allowed them to be flexible at the cost of playing with fire - I'm impressed they got away with it for so long, really

This is a classic move to not get sued, exactly like airlines do. If you try to sue them after redeeming the gift card, they can argue that you've been made whole, and do 'ot 'eed additional compensation.

Your 'n' key has been sleeping with the apostrophe.

This is very misleading!

CrowdStrike did not send gift cards to customers or clients. 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.

I mean, it makes it a little better, but I'd still be annoyed by it just being 10 bucks.
They might as well not do it. I'd be more insulted than a boss throwing a pizza party
- Seriously, ten bucks won't even cover delivery costs and fees for most things on Uber Eats. It's almost worse than nothing, because with the gift card you're obligated to give even more money to Uber Eats
- Oh yeah for sure, I wonder if the thinking was "we're about to lose a bunch of money, maybe limit it a little" 😂
OK. That makes a lot more sense.
Thank you for correcting the original post. 👍
Nice gesture I guess, but kinda just the modern day pizza party