The company behind a global IT outage which knocked hundreds of millions of computers offline, caused travel chaos and crippled healthcare systems have offered their partners £7.75 gift cards to say ‘sorry’.
In an email sent out to the Crowdstrike team and partners of the company, Daniel Bernard, the chief business officer, apologised for the chaos.
The email read: ‘We recognise the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused. And for that, we send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience.
‘To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!’
Recipients were then given a code to use on UberEats, worth £7.75 ($10 USD).
But many employees who tried to cash in the voucher were – ironically – met with yet another ‘error’ message, reading: ‘The voucher has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid’.
A spokesperson from Crowdstrike then clarified that Uber had flagged the voucher as fraud due to the amount of people using it.
In a letter to customers and partners last week, chief executive George Kurtz said: ‘We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this.
‘I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you’re engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives.’
Industry expert Adam Leon Smith of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, warned it could take ‘weeks’ for all computers and systems to be fully restored, while Mr Kurtz said it would take ‘some time’.
He told NBC: ‘Some of the systems that aren’t recovering, we’re working with them, so it could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover, but it is our mission to make sure that every customer is fully recovered and we’re not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were and we’ll continue to protect them and keep the bad guys out of their systems.’
The outage saw passengers stranded in airports for more than 50 hours due to flight cancellations.
Brits holidaying on the Greek island of Corfu said they were desperate to get back home after waiting in the airport for more than two days.
Airlines reported being unable to process passengers and resorted to manually checking in customers at airports around the world with 167 flights departing from the UK and 171 incoming cancelled on Friday.
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