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Last week, major industries around the globe were crippled by an outage linked to the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which apparently did what it could to make up for the catastrophe by sending out gift cards that some people who received them say they weren’t able to retrieve.
Most people probably weren’t familiar with CrowdStrike prior to last Friday, but the company found itself thrust into the spotlight for all of the wrong reasons on July 19th courtesy of an update that bricked millions of devices running its software on Windows platforms and subsequently caused widespread mayhem.
The outage affected major airlines that were forced to cancel thousands of flights, banks and stock exchanges that were unable to process transactions, and—most concerningly—hospitals that were unable to access patient records as well emergency services like 911 that had their systems knocked offline.
CrowdStrike’s CEO has already been summoned to appear at a Congressional hearing to answer questions about the debacle that one insurance company estimates could cost the companies that were impacted upwards of $15 billion when everything is said and done.
According to TechCrunch, some CrowdStrike clients had an email appear in their inbox this week from Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard, who apologized on behalf of the company while providing its customers with some resources they can turn to as they continue to clean up the mess stemming from the outage.
The mea culpa ends with an invitation to use an UberEats code meant to be used for a “cup of coffee or a late night snack” that was reportedly worth around $10, and while I’d argue that was probably insulting on its own, the fact that some users were told the voucher had been canceled when they went to redeem it really added insult to injury.
If you’re having a rough week, you can at least take solace in knowing it’s not even close to as bad as the one people who work for CrowdStrike are dealing with.