On 19 July, a chunk of the world came to a standstill as computers crashed, showing the Blue Screen of Death.
Banks, postal services, restaurants, and airports all came to a practical standstill.
Changi Airport saw long lines for certain airlines, with manual check-ins required.
CrowdStrike Offers Gift Cards as Compensation
The perpetrators? It wasn’t a malicious group of hackers typing away in a basement. Rather, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused the problem with a faulty update that brought down Windows devices.
Despite being meant to protect your computers, they ended up causing more damage than any malicious cyberattack could have.
You can watch a video explaining it in simple terms here:
CrowdStrike apologised for the colossal mess-up with appropriate compensation, that being US$10 (S$13.44) Uber Eats gift cards, reported TechCrunch.
It’s about enough for half a McDonald’s burger, delivery fees and tax included.
But if your mouth is watering already, don’t get too hasty. You probably won’t even receive the gift cards.
CrowdStrike only handed it out to their partners, while customers received a sum of S$0 instead.
You see, the cybersecurity firm quickly worked to roll back the defective update following the global IT outage, but things weren’t so easy to fix.
Since affected computers received the Blue Screen and crashed, they couldn’t receive the rollback easily.
Each individual device had to be manually booted into Safe Mode by someone, usually the IT people of the affected company, and the update then had to be found in the files and deleted.
Needless to say, this was a long and tedious process, which is why some businesses have still not fully recovered from the IT calamity.
The US$10 gift cards were meant for their partners who were helping affected customers through this manual process.
In what appears to be consistency for CrowdStrike, those who tried to redeem the gift cards got an error instead.
“We’re sorry, this voucher has been cancelled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”
A CrowdStrike spokesperson claimed that Uber flagged the gift cards as fraud due to high usage rates.
It’s unclear if anyone will actually be getting “compensated” but we’re all staying tuned for CrowdStrike’s next blunder.
