CrowdStrike restores majority of systems after global outage, but apology not accepted
Almost all systems bricked by the CrowdStrike buggy update have been restored. George Kurtz, CEO at the cybersecurity company made the announcement on his LinkedIn over the weekend.
The global IT outage reported on Friday 19th January affected over 8.5 million Windows machines, disrupting critical services in sectors ranging from airlines and banking to healthcare. According to insurance firm Parametrix, the top 500 US companies by revenue, excluding Microsoft, suffered $5.4bn (£4.1bn) in financial losses from the outage.
Crowdstrike and Microsoft quickly released a solution, but it required people to be able to physically access devices, which proved difficult in many cases. Luckily, they were able to create a tool to automate the process and speed up recovery. Everybody in the industry has also been very supportive offering to help in whichever way they could.
As all this was happening, CrowdStrike attempted to make up for the disruption by offering a $10 Uber Eats voucher.
"To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late-night snack is on us!" CrowdStrike wrote, directing people to use a code to access the $10 credit.
However, this token compensation was met with derision, with some critics arguing that it is insufficient to address the severity of the disruption caused by the outage.
"I literally wanted to drive my car off a bridge this weekend and they bought me coffee. Nice," wrote one user on Reddit.
Other users have reported getting an error from Uber Eats after trying to redeem the voucher. A company spokesman said Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates
As CrowdStrike continues to work towards full system restoration, the company faces the daunting task of rebuilding trust with its customers and addressing the fallout from the incident. Will there be long-term consequences for the company? That remains to be seen, but the immediate effects have been significant.
At the start of the month, CrowdStrike’s market cap was $95 billion. At the time of writing this, the company is valued at $63 billion meaning the incident has wiped its value by $30 billion.
