Now that the dust is beginning to settle from Friday’s global software outage, caused by a glitch in a CrowdStrike software, the cybersecurity firm is reportedly trying to make amends to its partners that were thrust into a weekend of chaos.
According to a report by TechCrunch, a technology news website, CrowdStrike emailed its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card in recognition of “the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused.”
A nice gesture to be sure, but according to some reports on social media, some of the gift cards don’t work. According to CrowdStrike, reports began circulating Wednesday that some recipients, when redeeming the gift card, got a message saying that it had been cancelled by the issuing party and was no longer valid.
A CrowdStrike spokesperson confirmed that the company had sent out gift cards to partners affected by last week’s outage but Uber had classified them as fraudulent because so many were used in such a short period of time.
The outage
On Friday, July 19, Windows devices and networks around the world suddenly stopped working and continually tried to reboot. The trigger for the outage appears to be software from CrowdStrike called Falcon. Falcon is an application that provides cybersecurity features for computers including anti-virus and intrusion detection, among other things.
After uncovering the underlying issue, Microsoft was able to restore services running in Azure within five to six hours. But the problem persisted since the faulty software update from CrowdStrike didn’t only impact Microsoft, but many companies using Falcon experienced outages themselves. It was up to individual companies to get their systems back up manually.
