Last week, the world reacted as 8.5 million computers crashed to bluescreen, grounding flights, crippling hospitals, and bringing down 911 services. This week, the world is reacting to the company responsible—Crowdstrike—offering its staff and the companies it works with a $US10 Uber Eats voucher as way of apology for all their extra work over the weekend. People are not pleased.
Sometimes I try to imagine being the person responsible for innocently hitting the button that rolled out the Crowdstrike update that ground planet Earth to a halt. Then I stop, because evening thinking about it triggers my anxiety. Fortunately for whoever that was, they’ll likely never be identified. Instead, the name of the once fairly anonymous company they work for now is now known by absolutely everyone, and associated with only one moment.
Given Crowdstrike’s day-job is to help companies respond in the event of a cyberattack, you might imagine damage control was a concept with which it had some manner of familiarity. However, in an email sent out to its staff and partner companies, it managed the most impressively cloth-eared response, saying,
To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!
The email came with a code that would unlock a $US10 Uber Eats voucher. A figure just low enough to be next to useless.
It would be very reasonable to suspect that this was one of very many fraudulent emails and links that have gone around since Friday’s incident, attempting to take advantage of the situation for malware, phishing and all manner of scams. However, according to CNN, a Crowdstrike spokesperson confirmed the emails were legitimate.
However, CNN reports that the spike in uses of the particular code caused Uber to flag it as fraud! Just perfect.
The BBC spotted a LinkedIn comment by one IT manager who says he works with Crowdstrike. “I received an email regarding the recent incident,” he posted to the networking site, adding, “The gesture of a cup of coffee or Uber Eats credit as an apology doesn’t seem to make up for the tens of thousands lost in man hours and customer trust due to the July 19 incident.”
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So far, the company has made no mention of any response or recompense for affected customers. Given the company’s CEO, George Kurtz, went live on TV the morning of the disaster to apologize, and has since issued a statement including an apology that takes responsibility for the outages, it’s hard to imagine how it will be able to fend off the inevitable deluge of lawsuits from those financially affected.
Insurance company Parametrix issued a booklet earlier this week outlining the effect of Friday’s mishap on Fortune 500 companies, saying 25 percent were affected. The company claims a total loss of $US5.4 billion, excluding Microsoft. Parametrix says the healthcare sector was the worst affected, followed by banking, and then airlines. The report says that healthcare companies lost an estimated $US1.94 billion, with banking losing $US1.15 billion, and airlines a total of $US860 million. (It’s worth noting that Parametrix insures companies against such downtime losses, so it’s in their interests to highlight such scale.)
Of course, even if companies are able to recover losses through insurance, the insurers are going to want their money back too. We’ve reached out to Crowdstrike to ask for their thoughts on the reaction to the $US10 coupons, and what plans the firm has in place for customer compensation.
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