Whoever came up with this voucher idea must have been both brain-dead and tone-deaf. It’s insulting.

Rather than even trying to offer compensation it would have been far better to just be upfront with an apology.

Example: “We are deeply sorry for our recent incident. No compensation could make up for the damage this incident caused, or the untold thousands of cumulative hours that IT professionals across the globe spent to rectify it, in many cases working through their entire weekends or missing vacations to do so. We appreciate our failure has rightly caused a tremendous loss of faith in our brand and product, but please be assured we are working on concrete steps to ensure an incident of this kind cannot happen again, and will share those plans with you soon.”

I’d rather hear that, to be fair.

How does corpo PR still mess this sort of thing up so badly? Just issue a statement:

1. Acknowledge and take responsibility for your part of the incident. DO NOT try and shirk any responsibility.

2. Outline what you will do to prevent the problem for happening again.

3. Commit to providing progress updates on the resolution.

On issues of this magnitude, there’s simply no way to compensate everyone whose time and effort you’ve wasted. Don’t insult people with a meagre offering. Instead, commit those resources to a resolution, and simply ask for forgiveness.

I suppose this does exemplify the corporation mindset.

Lets break several hundreds of millions of PCs around the world bringing mass transit, hospitals and airlines to a halt. Causing billions in damages to our paying customers and their customers. If we offer $10 gift cards we are cool right?

I thought the voucher thing was satire. Wow