CrowdStrike offers takeaway vouchers as apology after IT outage crisis... but they don't work

Last week, parts of the world appeared to come to a standstill, following a computer outage caused by a botched update from cyber security company CrowdStrike .

According to TechCrunch , the company has since sent out Uber vouchers as an apology, but these too have been causing problems. There are reports of the vouchers throwing up an error message that the voucher “has been cancelled by the issuing party and is no longer valid”.

These $10 (around £7.76) vouchers were not sent to the companies affected by the CrowdStrike outage , which could be deemed offensive given the sheer damage caused to some of them, but to employees who ended up working on the crisis.

“We recognise the additional work the July 19 incident has caused. And for that we send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience,” the email sent to these partners read.

“To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late-night snack is on us,” said CrowdStrike.

The company claims this latest voucher-cancelling blunder is not actually its fault, though. “Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates,” CrowdStrike told Sky News .

A report on what actually happened on July 19, CrowdStrike’s Preliminary Post Incident Review, sheds some light on the cause of the mass outage. It has been described as the biggest IT failure in history, which among other effects caused thousands of flight cancellations and tens of thousands of flight delays worldwide.

It was all down to a faulty update to software designed to keep companies safe from security threats.

“Due to a bug in the Content Validator, one of the two Template Instances passed validation despite containing problematic content data,” reads the CrowdStrike report .

It affected an estimated 8.5 million devices running Microsoft Windows.

The crisis caused the EMIS system used widely across the NHS to go down, which limited healthcare providers’ access to patient records.

NHS England reported systems were starting to come back online by Saturday, July 20, but the effects of the resulting backlog will be harder to shift.

“There may be some continued disruption, particularly to GP services, in some areas into next week as practices work to rebook appointments,” an NHS spokesperson said last week.

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