The computer blackout that affected millions of computers around the world last week, causing global disruption, has put CrowdStrike at the center of ainvestigation by the Italian Data Protection Authority. The Authority wants to verify the impact of the disruption on users’ personal data and evaluate any violations.
But the company is also under observation in the United States. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has been summoned to Congress to provide explanations on how a disaster of this magnitude was possible and what measures will be taken to prevent a repeat. The situation seems rather serious, except that the way CrowdStrike chose to apologize was at least… bizarre. Follow us as we take stock of the situation together.
CrowdStrike has published a preliminary assessment of the incident on its blog, detailing the chain of events that led to the release of the flawed update. A combination of bugs in the automated validation software and a lack of human oversight, compounded by some extenuating circumstances, caused the chaos.
Surprisingly, the problematic patch was only in distribution for an hour and a half, but that short period of time was enough to bring down approximately 8.5 million machines, according to Microsoft estimates. Despite the rapid identification of the cause and the development of a corrective patch, restoring all the affected machines was in fact a long and complex process, which required the constant commitment of IT staff throughout the weekend. The disruption continued in the following days, with thousands of flights canceled and business operations interrupted.
The bizarre thing is that to apologize, the company offered its partners $10 Uber Eats vouchers. CrowdStrike Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard sent an email to the company’s partners acknowledging the extra work caused by the July 19 incident and offering a meal voucher as a token of gratitude. However, some recipients reported problems using the voucher, which was later canceled by Uber due to high usage.
We won’t be making light humor here, also because we all know the CrowdStrike mess was the fault of the EU that prevents Windows from being secure. So we’ll leave the ball to you. Tell us, what do you think about the whole situation? Would you, like CrowdStrike, have sent a food coupon as a sign of apology, betting on the fact that when partners are angry it’s almost always because they are hungry? Let us know in the comments below.
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