When ‘sorry’ seems to be the smallest number  

NOT to look a gift card in the QR code or anything, but it’s remarkable how in a span of a week, CrowdStrike has shown us how not to (a) roll out a software update and (b) apologise to the people it inconvenienced while bungling (a).

Last week, CrowdStrike gave its third-party agents a US$10 Uber Eats voucher to “recognise the additional work” they’d had to do after the cybersecurity firm caused a global outage with a faulty update. This gesture was ridiculed online and, to compound matters, some people were unable to redeem the voucher after Uber flagged it for fraud because of high usage rates.

This blunder is a mere footnote in the narrative of CrowdStrike’s ongoing woes, but makes a fascinating case study in apologising for everyone else. Even if you, dear reader, haven’t caused a worldwide Blue Screen of Death, these universal principles of apology still apply.

First, your apology needs to match the nature of the injury. If you’ve caused someone monetary loss, then by all means give them cash to make up for it. But in almost every other instance, money is a poor poultice for hurt. It is especially so when you’ve taken something from them that they cannot recover – like the weekend that everyone lost as they worked to clean up the CrowdStrike fallout.

Second, don’t give them something that is easy to value, because it forces the angry person to quantify what you’ve truly cost them. In its note to partners, CrowdStrike had framed its US$10 voucher as having “your next cup of coffee or late night snack” on them. I suspect that condensing someone’s 48 hours of stress and toil into a latte is the sort of thing that turns someone into a communist.

Third, if you simply must give the aggrieved party something of monetary value, for the love of all software updates, don’t pick an amount that is paltry from most objective perspectives. A sum of US$10 will just about cover a Big Mac meal which costs an average of US$9.29 in the United States, and will remind the person you’re trying to appease of the inflationary walls closing in on their hourly wage existence.

Now, not only are you strangely peckish, you’re mad at CrowdStrike, Ronald McDonald and the Federal Reserve.

This apology dissection is awfully churlish, you might think. CrowdStrike at least attempted to display some goodwill; they could’ve done nothing. Paradoxically, doing nothing would’ve been best here. Their apology was the worst possible kind: it cost them a tidy hill of beans when they should’ve been conserving cash, but did not mean very much at all to individual recipients. The best way for CrowdStrike to right this wrong would be to not reoffend for a very, very long time.

That is simple to recommend, but not easy to do. Global outages will become more frequent as systems become more complex and the pressure for rapid deployment increases. Tech firms will be perpetually apologising for all sorts of gaffes; so we should brace ourselves for an unending chorus of “We’re sorry”. It will be a tired refrain and hold little credence – but it will still beat hearing: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”