CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers with a botched update all over the world last week, is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, according to several people who say they received the gift card, as well as a source who also received one.
On Wednesday, some of the people who posted about the gift card said that when they went to redeem the offer, they got an error message saying the voucher had been canceled. When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”
On Friday, CrowdStrike released a faulty update that rendered around 8.5 million Windows devices unusable, according to Microsoft. The update caused the affected computers to be stuck at the infamous “blue screen of death,” or BSOD, a bright blue error screen with a message that is shown when Windows crashes or cannot load because of a critical software failure.
The outage caused delays at airports in Amsterdam, Berlin, Dubai, and London, and across the United States. It also caused several hospitals to halt surgeries, and paralyzed countless businesses all over the world.
Seriously doubt it. Elective surgeries were likely cancelled, which could certainly prolong suffering for some, but life saving surgeries can absolutely happen and do without computers.
It’s really hard to know for sure. Some percentage of elective surgeries or procedures end up detecting something life threatening. If the canceled procedures were rescheduled promptly then the outcomes probably haven’t changed in a meaningful way. But in the US, stuff is booked out months in advance so it may be impossible to get everyone rescheduled for something in the next week or two.