2024-07-25 18:28:19
Crowdstrike paralyzed millions of computers last week. Now the company is thanking its workers – with a voucher that doesn’t work.
About a week ago, a faulty update from a security company paralyzed an estimated 8.5 million Windows computers worldwide. At airports, banks and hospitals, among other places, nothing suddenly worked anymore. The software company behind this was Crowdstrike, which says it has many customers in the private and public sectors.
Now the computers are running again – thanks in part to the company’s numerous workers. Crowdstrike is now thanking the overworked IT experts with a ten-dollar voucher. In the accompanying email, a top manager at Crowdstrike pointed out that the PC crashes last Friday had given employees additional work.
“To express our gratitude, the next late night coffee or snack is on us,” the voucher for the delivery service Uber Eats said, as the news agency Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. According to a spokeswoman for Crowdstrike, the voucher codes went to team members and partners who helped the company’s customers restore their systems. They were not sent to customers, she told Bloomberg.
Shortly afterwards, however, the US technology news company “TechCrunch” reported an error message that appeared when redeeming the voucher at Uber Eats. Several Crowdstrike employees had apparently complained about the error on social media: “Hey Crowdstrike, your stupid voucher doesn’t even work.”
Crowdstrike has since discovered that the test mechanisms for the software update allowed a faulty file to pass through, which then caused Windows computers to crash. The test systems are now to be improved – and updates are to be rolled out gradually in the future so that any problems do not immediately affect all customers.