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CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

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Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite enough? The last time I had a "discount" for Uber Eats, it was a $15 meal with so many fees on it that AFTER the $30 discount, I still needed to pay $35. Cancelled.

Yes, Uber Eats is so expensive it feels like they could give away $10 vouchers and still make a handsome profit. I wonder how much CrowdStrike paid for these vouchers? Surely nothing like $10 each.

Maybe someone in Uber's marketing department was very clever and saw this opportunity. "He Crowdstrike, we see that you are having a bad week. How about we help you out with free gift cards for your customers. That will help fix up the relationships". Or maybe they even paid Crowdstrike.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#113
There was a musician in my town who passed a hat after each show, and he said, "put in whatever you wouldn't be embarrassed to accept if someone gave it to you."

I can see someone thinking $10 was a nice idea, but letting the impact settle a bit before narrative reingagement would have seemed wiser. Interesting to think about what to do instead though. Thought of discounts on renewals or account credits, but anything that seems like bargaining is going to get flak. In terms of who was really affected by the outages, maybe demonstrate recognition by donating to a PTSD or family support charity. wonder what thinking of each customer is a person in a family would do to tech product decisions in general.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#114
post #45

What fraction of the reporting is "CrowdStrike" versus "CloudStrike"? The first reporting I heard was "CloudStrike", but the company appears to be "CrowdStrike".

I did not see any reporting on "Cloudstrike". Either you're misremembering the happenings of Friday, or there was some sloppy reporting.

There are random news sites out there that have reported the name incorrectly.

e.g. https://fortune.com/2024/07/19/cloudstrike-microsoft-massive... https://www.standard.net/news/business/2024/jul/23/lessons-l...

Looks like a minority, though it's concerning that Fortune reported it with an incorrect name.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#115
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's what I suspect happened: Any contract requires consideration. Without it, it's not a valid contract. It doesn't require fair consideration, so a clause giving e.g. $1 is typical for many contracts. They were nice and bumped it up to $20. I suspect your work DID belong to the company already, under work-for-hire doctrine, but an explicit contract avoids that ambiguity. Ambiguity can be bad and super-expensive,…

Salary in this case would serve as the consideration for the work they perform, but lawyers love making things as explicit as possible (understandably).

You already get salary though. They can't just keep adding contracts and terms and say it's covered by previous payments.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#116
Distributing $10 gift cards is so obviously wrong I can't even comprehend how it was approved.

I wonder how much money in total they represent, and if CrowdStrike would have come out better saying "We've immediately allocated $X amount of funds to making sure this issue won't happen again" instead of dividing in x * $10 uber eats insults.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#117

‘ 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.”’

Am I correct in interpreting that they canceled a multi-use code after it was shared publicly? I think that would be quite reasonable and an insignificant offense compared to pushing code that breaks your clients' computers or offering $10 of compensation for having done so.

I wouldn't trust a cybersecurity company that sends out a multi-use code, even if it's for a 3rd party.

While I do understand that this might have been sent by a department far removed from IT, it's still scary that they didn't think of possible abuse.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#118
post #9

This reminds me of something that happened at a former employer. After I had been employed there for a couple of years, someone in HR or Legal noticed that the programmers had never signed any "our code belongs to the company" agreement. So they asked us to sign a paper to that effect, and gave us each a check for $20. My thought was that I always assumed the company owned this code, but if they were going to pay for…

Here's what I suspect happened: Any contract requires consideration. Without it, it's not a valid contract. It doesn't require fair consideration, so a clause giving e.g. $1 is typical for many contracts. They were nice and bumped it up to $20. I suspect your work DID belong to the company already, under work-for-hire doctrine, but an explicit contract avoids that ambiguity. Ambiguity can be bad and super-expensive,…

Honestly if a contract only offers 1$ as compensation for many hours worth of work then that's pretty much admitting the consideration is inadequate.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#119

I think the closest level of Brand disaster in our times would be the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In that case, BP basically threw away their consumer brand in the US - they turned every single BP station into an Arco station (their subsidiary, "lower quality" brand at the time). Then they sold off or spun down a huge portion of their businesses to set aside money for legal fees. I don't know if Crowdstrike really h…

> ... BP basically threw away their consumer brand in the US ... That must not have lasted long. I don't recall a time when there wasn't a BP station during and after that disaster.

Maybe it depends on where you live/how strong their brand presence was. But they completely pulled out of the West Coast at least. I watched them tear down BP signs and put up Arco signs a month after the spill.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#120
post #9

This reminds me of something that happened at a former employer. After I had been employed there for a couple of years, someone in HR or Legal noticed that the programmers had never signed any "our code belongs to the company" agreement. So they asked us to sign a paper to that effect, and gave us each a check for $20. My thought was that I always assumed the company owned this code, but if they were going to pay for…

My friends and I contracted to a company in 2004 to build a text message system. The company decided they didn't want to pay us the last month's bill. They'd spent all their money buying a custom Harley as a prize for the customers and now had nothing left.

We met with their CEO+CFO+lawyers and our lawyers. They were adamant they wouldn't pay the last payment. We pulled out our contract and showed they didn't own any of their code because there was no IP transfer in there. They said "We need a minute." We left the room, came back in and there was a check for the outstanding balance in the middle of the table.

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