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the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”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.
In terms of PR, this is literally worse than doing nothing
Reminds me of the pizza party my call center threw once. We had to pay for the pizza and bring our own drinks
That’s when you bring a handle of vodka and piss all over the call center yelling “here’s my drink!”
Wow, so the ‘pizza party’ was basically a pizza pot luck?
Yes, to be fair they did the same with the new years party, they’d do a collection between the employees to hire a place
Mind you there were around 300 employees in the company this is not a mom and pop shop we’re talking about
Every party at my last job was a potluck. Except the Christmas party. The Christmas party was secretly mandatory though.
That seems to be their modus operandi…crowdstrike literally worse than doing nothing
Truer words could not be spoken.
Bro $10 and its not even real money??? You can’t buy anything for $10 on Uber Eats even if the coupon worked.
Lmao, i thought for sure this was an onion article…
Exactly, they probably got a discount from Uber on the cost for that reason.
You can use it as a tip to pay the worker the employer doesn’t pay?
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Citation needed.
I’ve seen reports of hospitals delaying non-essential and elective surgeries, but no reports of emergency care being impacted
Yup, the same happened during the various COVID waves. When there are more patients than they can reasonably provide care for, they triage and ensure those with the greatest need get seen.
My wife said that the nurses’ computers were down in the neonatal ICU that she works with. So they had no access to any patient’s medication lists or dosages during the outage.
Oops, never mind, you don’t even get the $10.
Did anyone actually die because of it? I couldn’t find any reports on that. Maybe that’s just because Google is useless, idk
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.
That’s really hard to evaluate.
There were almost certainly a meaningful number of deaths in affected facilities, but a single weekend is a short enough sample that it’s hard to say confidently without a lot of data. Stuff like temperature and air quality affects death rates, as does stuff like “it’s already been hot for a week and the patients who were most vulnerable to heat already died”. And there were a lot of tests and scans that were cancelled (or at least delayed) that would have caught something, or patients that couldn’t get admitted who should have been, or a whole host of other things that are hard to measure.
Basically, there’s enough actual variance and pseudo variance through factors that are hard to measure that it would take a pretty big swing to be definitive. But purely on the basis that quality of care is correlated to death rate and quality of care was meaningfully degraded, the reasonable assumption would be that there were some, even if providing data to back it would be extremely difficult.
I’ve heard this a lot but haven’t seen any mention of anyone dying. Do you have a source?
Even if this was true, get your facts straight before you spout bullshit:
THE OFFERINGS AND CROWDSTRIKE TOOLS ARE NOT FAULT-TOLERANT AND ARE NOT DESIGNED OR INTENDED FOR USE IN ANY HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENT REQUIRING FAIL-SAFE PERFORMANCE OR OPERATION. NEITHER THE OFFERINGS NOR CROWDSTRIKE TOOLS ARE FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION, NUCLEAR FACILITIES, COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, WEAPONS SYSTEMS, DIRECT OR INDIRECT LIFE-SUPPORT SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, OR ANY APPLICATION OR INSTALLATION WHERE FAILURE COULD RESULT IN DEATH, SEVERE PHYSICAL INJURY, OR PROPERTY DAMAGE.
https://www.crowdstrike.com/terms-conditions/
EDIT: OP deleted their post that said people died in hospitals because of the BSOD update, which isn’t true. Even if it was, the terms of service specifically says the software is not fault tolerant and to not use where failure could result in death. For the record, I think they’re handling this like shit
LoL
Source?
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So a simple power outage or broken networking hardware would be enough to kill people in your hospital?…
There’s good reason that hospitals have their own backup emergency generators. A blackout absolutely would kill people.
Yes, but they typically don’t just run the whole building, only vital stuff and emergency lighting.
If the system being cripple cost lives, that’s a failure of your procedures, systems, training, management and backups.
It shouldn’t take hours to override the system, why wasn’t someone on staff who was trained on the system? Why weren’t paper charts available sooner? That sounds more like negligence than a system causing an issue. If someone on staff was trained, it should have taken minutes to fix the issue.
If a crash like this cost lives, that’s your own negligence, not a computer glitches.
The patients or their families don’t even get the gift card, that goes to the hospital.
Man if a hospital gets crippled by a computer glitch, there’s something seriously wrong.
People don’t seriously believe this crap do they?
Your chart is stored on windows computers. The drug dispensing systems run on windows computers. Imaging (xray, ultrasound, CT, MRI) runs on windows machines. If a hospital used crowd strike, all of those go down. Source: i work at a major trauma center that was affected and took several hours to respond. OR, ER and ICU were completely frozen for several hours before they could pivot to paper charting. There aren’t paper backups of every chart so orders that weren’t already under way were also almost always delayed pending a verbal order from the physician.
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If they aren’t printing paper already pretty sure they are being negligent of the current legislation. They have to be be able to work through minimal power, infrastructure and services already, and they have to be ready for a cyber or terrorist attack.
Sounds like your unit, if you eve work for one, is negligent in its operation.
Nope, wife works at a hospital and they don’t have a paper backup of everything. They were affected by the outage and it was apparently a pretty tough night.
They can still work, but there obviously will be a serious delay switching to paper everything. You might want to look into the legislation that you’re thinking of to see what it specifically says.
And I’m pretty sure there are ways to prevent what happened that have nothing to do with having medical professionals chart everything on both a computer and on paper. That just sounds really inefficient.
Especially for an event that might happen at most once a decade.
It’s not like it happens every other month.
Why add the “if you even work for one” part? You think this person just made that up to comment here? People do things. People who do things are online. People who are online can comment. You’re giving serious old “r/nothingeverhappens” vibes.
Because they are lying about people dying when there’s been no reported incidences.
It also doesn’t take hours to shift to paper charts, that’s only if you’re negligent, or lacked proper training. Both aren’t because of a computer malfunction, that’s a failure of your procedures and operations.
So yeah, even if the system went down, they failed to have the right backups or training. If anyone died, that’s on them, not their system. So if they claim they work for a hospital, but can’t even comprehend this? Than they’re either wholefully not equipped to work for a hospital, or they are lying.
Can’t people be called out on their clear and obvious bullshit? If people don’t, these comments will be left and up and thought to be true, when they aren’t. And people like you making these comments help perpetuate the bullshit.
So thanks for doing your part perpetuating misinformation I guess…?
I’m not going to address your whole comment, but as far as I know there’s no proof of your very first sentence.
Can you tell me about your experience switching to paper charts in a hospital when the computer system goes down?
The hospital I worked for had workstations with localized backups of the medical record system that they would use in the event of an outage. They could print from them but it wasn’t like they were printing out every single thing ahead of time. They could run on generator power and still access records without network access but if those PCs had been taken down by this issue I could see that turning into a big problem. I talked to someone that’s still there and he said they didn’t have many issues due to crowdstrike though.
Do you actually work for a hospital? None of the clinics I’ve done IT for have ever done full paper charts. In fact, that vast majority of them actively pushed to do everything digitally to save paper (and were in process of converting paper to digital charts and archiving all paper charts).
Just about every one uses something like Epic to do all charting. The closest I’ve found are for exams and specialist appointments where they have to do a lot of writing or drawing on silhouette to not physical issues.
This is worse than getting a pizza party for turning a profit.
Or an encourage-mint
Did they try redeeming it up to 15 times?
$10 wouldn’t even cover 10 minutes of admin time to fix the problem. It’s honestly a bigger insult than nothing or just flipping the bird.
It also wouldn’t cover a meal from Uber Eats.
Definitely worse than nothing.
Especially since it’s a gift card not money
A sandwich is $12-15 these days. That doesn’t even include the service fee or the driver’s tip.
Not to mention this “apology” has profit for Uber built into it. Or serves as a marketing campaign for them, depending on what kind of deal they offered them to use Uber gift cards for this.
Like with $10 not even being enough to order much of anything, Uber could probably still come out ahead of they offered them at less than half of the “face value”. I regularly get offers for more than $10 off other food delivery services just to sign up, so I wouldn’t even rule out Uber offering to do this for free just for the marketing.
Like I ignore those other offers but had to think about this one before I realized it was just as ignorable because the idea of it being “compensation” made it seem more worthwhile than a marketing giveaway would be.
Plus, I bet there’s an agreement to not sue baked into this offer.
I just got hit with a really weird edge case and just barely resolved a 2 day 911 to recover. During this time we likely spent at least 10 million and that’s not even the primary incident.
this genuinely seems satire theres no way
Reality is a simulation and someone outside of it is fucking with us until we realize the truth. It’s the only explanation.
Way to stay on brand guys!
Wow $10. Mom can finally get that operation she was waiting for, before all the nurse stations BSOD’d.
It’s just one
bananaglobal computer outage, Michael. How much could it cost – $10?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.”
The humor writes itself.
The fact that they even fucked up an insultingly low priced voucher is impressive. They keep showing their incompetence I guess lol!
Someone has taken up Musk’s challenge for a “destroying an established company any % speed run.”
Can’t wait for the summoning salt video
Probably would’ve been better to not issue that at all.
I’m fairly sure the vouchers are sponsored, they’re so low it’s essentially advertising for Uber Eats
At this rate, they’ll have a crowd of striking people outside their office in no time!
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If only that were true…
Wow… fuck…
Is there a term for this? Giving someone something and then taking it back? I mean, there’s “Indian Giving”, but I want one that isn’t racist, outdated, and based on a poor understanding of US History?
If there’re no other alternatives, then I propose that going forward the new term for this should be “Crowd Striking”
I feel like CrowdStrike did some much groundbreakingly stupid shit that this term will be too ambiguous…
But “Indian Giving” as a concept was just a way to excuse giving the indians a deal then renegging on it everytime the wind blew. Classic projrction propaganda before it was invented by ivy leauge schools.
Indeed, that’s why I was asking for a non-offensive version of the term to apply when people actually give you something and take it back.
I believe that “Indian Giving” is sourced in a cultural misunderstanding between Indigenous and European societies. Indigenous societies were reciprocity based, so giving gifts should be reciprocated with a gift of like value to strengthen relationships, or increase honour (social standing). The Europeans were working in a patron-client system so a gift was seen as a way of purchasing access to power through a patron. The Europeans thought the Indigenous people were paying for access to power (like a tributary), so there’s no expectation of returning a like gift. The indigenous people thought they were entering into a mutual relationship, and when a like gift wasn’t returned that was seen as reneging, so they took back their ‘offer’.
Glad to have an anthropologist kick my ass.
Ill ask around local MMA gyms
Short-term gifter
You misspelled long term grifter
You can’t get anything from Uber eats for less than $30 in my city.
$10 wouldn’t even cover ONE of the service fees.
I love when they send me 40% off coupons and it’s still so expensive it’s not worth it.
$30‽ Wo even is ordering there? Why?
Interrobang.
Lazy people with tech salaries. I have a tech salary but I’m not lazy enough to enjoy spending 80 dollars on dinner for two that would cost 35 if I drove my damn self.
