CrowdStrike offers $10 apology gift cards after global tech outage

(NewsNation) — CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers worldwide last week, is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, as first reported by industry publication TechCrunch. 

In an email posted to X, CrowdStrike reportedly said that the company recognizes the “additional work” caused by the crash on July 19. 

The email, sent from a CrowdStrike email address in the name of Daniel Bernard, the company’s chief business officer, read that the firm was sending “heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience.” 

“To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us,” the end of the email read with a link to Uber Eats. 

CrowdStrike later confirmed in a statement to Nexstar that the company only sent the gift cards to its teammates and partners, not customers.

“CrowdStrike did not send gift cards to customers or clients," the statement reads. "We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation."

Engadget reported that some people had a difficult time using the gift cards on Uber Eats, which apparently displayed a message saying the offer had been rescinded.

CrowdStrike said in its statement that "Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates."

The CrowdStrike outage affected companies worldwide across multiple industries including banks, airlines, railway companies, hospitals, 911 services and some broadcast news operations. The company said a software bug in its content-validation system led to the outage.

"We can’t repeat enough, we’re aware of the impact and deeply sorry this occurred. We want to thank our customers and industry partners for their support and assistance following the release of a faulty content update. We know what happened and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again," CrowdStrike said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.