‘We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation,’ according to a CrowdStrike spokesperson.

CrowdStrike has confirmed to CRN that it sent partners Uber gift cards that stopped working – a gesture of appreciation mocked online as the cybersecurity vendor and solution providers deal with the fallout of a faulty CrowdStrike update that downed millions of Microsoft Windows machines worldwide.

“CrowdStrike did not send gift cards to customers or clients,” a spokesperson for the Austin, Texas-based vendor said to CRN in an email. “We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation. Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates.”

The gift cards were meant to redeem $10 from the Uber Eats food delivery service, but recipients were hit with error messages when they tried to redeem the voucher, according to TechCrunch. Screenshots and text from the CrowdStrike email with the Uber Eats code thanking partners for their work on the July 19 incident were shared on social media platforms including Reddit and X, formerly known as Twitter, Tuesday and Wednesday.

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Multiple CrowdStrike partners contacted by CRN said they hadn’t received the gift card email and even thought the email was an outside party’s attempt at a phishing or misinformation attack before CrowdStrike itself confirmed the email.

The CrowdStrike spokesperson did not reply to follow up questions about whether more gift card codes will get sent out to partners who couldn’t redeem the code or who never received the email.

Louis Corriero, vice president of cloud at Paramus, N.J.-based CrowdStrike partner IT Vortex, posted on LinkedIn that “the gesture of a cup of coffee or Uber Eats credit as an apology doesn’t seem to make up for the tens of thousands lost in man hours and customer trust due to the July 19 incident.”

He told CRN in an interview that the incident led to IT Vortex employees waking up at 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. to help customers and explain that the incident was outside of his MSSP’s control.

His post “doesn’t go in depth on the pain and suffering this caused,” he said. He hopes that CrowdStrike gives “perhaps a month of free services or something to show a little empathy and reparation that matches the pain caused.”

However, Corriero said he is still a fan of CrowdStrike and its products. “I have no love loss even for what happened,” he said.

Phillip Walker, CEO of Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based CrowdStrike partner Network Solutions Provider, told CRN in an interview that gift cards were “a missed opportunity to truly support the business and people affected by the disruption” and have a hero moment with the channel and customers.

“Though the CrowdStrike incident was deeply problematic, it pales compared to the damage a malicious cyberattack could cause,” Walker said. ‘“This event highlights the necessity of continued investment in and reliance on cybersecurity expertise to protect our critical infrastructure and data.”

A CrowdStrike partner who asked CRN not to use his name said the gift cards were enough to have him ready to leave his partnership and go with a rival vendor. “We’re done,” the partner said.

It should be noted that the gift card is just one small part of CrowdStrike’s response to what some have deemed the worst IT outage of all time. Delta Airlines has reportedly continued to see flight cancellations Wednesday as a result of the outage.

The vendor released a “Preliminary Post Incident Review” Wednesday. And the gift card email points to information, tools and resources partners can use at CrowdStrike’s centralized Remediation Hub.

Screenshots and text from the email shared online and with CRN show that it was signed by CrowdStrike Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard. CRN has reached out to Bernard for comment.

“Dear CrowdStrike Partners,” the email said. “We recognize the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused. And for that, we send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience. … To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!”

“The impacted version of the channel file 291 was added to Falcon’s known-bad list in the CrowdStrike Cloud,” according to the email. “We also improved some of our cloud services to dramatically speed up their ability to make rapid communication to the sensor. No sensor updates, new channel files, or code was deployed from the CrowdStrike Cloud.”

One LinkedIn user identifying themselves as a systems administrator said online “please tell me someone made this up,” in response to the news.

A Reddit user shared the CrowdStrike email online with the comment, “I literally wanted to drive my car off a bridge this weekend and they bought me coffee. Nice.”