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A single CrowdStrike bug sent the entire tech world into chaos last week — a snafu some companies (see: Delta) are still recovering from. Third-party agents selling and supporting CrowdStrike software and the complicated repairs for customers have been a miserably busy bunch over the past week.
CrowdStrike’s token of appreciation for those vendors: a $10 Uber Eats voucher. We’re not kidding.
When reports of the voucher “gifts” first surfaced on Wednesday afternoon there were three main buckets of reactions:
Partners are working under immense pressure as the point of contact for their customers who, in some cases, still can’t operate their businesses as smoothly compared to before the outage.
Now partners could risk losing their customers as a result of this mess, even though it was out of their control. But a $10 Uber Eats voucher should make it all better, right?
A lot of users across social media platforms compared this to an office pizza party. Those tend to happen when bosses want to show they appreciate their employees’ hard work. There’s just a slight problem: Cheese and pepperoni don’t pay the bills.
The ironic part is, at least where I’m located, I can’t even get a pizza for $10 on Uber Eats after taxes and fees.
A can of Coke, a package of two small Twinkies and a Hershey’s chocolate bar were all among the very, very limited number of items I was able to identify that, purchased individually, would come out to just under $10 including taxes and fees. But that doesn’t even include a tip.
The CrowdStrike outage is Christmas in July for cybercriminals, who have been setting up phony websites meant to appeal to people seeking information on, or solutions to, the worldwide IT meltdown but in reality are designed to harvest visitors’ information or to breach their devices, my colleagues Brian Fung and Sean Lyngaas reported.
So everyone, understandably, is on guard. And it didn’t help that the voucher code in the email sent to many partners stopped working.
A CrowdStrike spokesperson confirmed the emails with the $10 vouchers were legitimate, adding that “Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates.” Likely meaning too many people were trying to piggyback off a lousy $10 voucher code sent to one person. Uber didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment.
As all of this was unraveling, some details got lost in translation about who was receiving the $10 vouchers. Many people incorrectly believed CrowdStrike was compensating customers for all their troubles.
That would be a pittance compared to what customers lost. The outage may have cost Fortune 500 companies as much as $5.4 billion in revenues and gross profit, according to an analysis from Parametrix, a cloud monitoring and insurance firm.
But it’s not clear if CrowdStrike will pay them back. The company hasn’t commented on any financial remediation efforts with customers. But experts told my colleague Chris Isidore that there will be demands for remuneration and very possibly lawsuits.
CrowdStrike has, however, apologized to them. But the software giant has yet to dole out a nickel to them for their troubles — not even a $10 Uber Eats voucher.
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