Delta Air Lines has reportedly brought in a high-profile attorney to pursue damages against CrowdStrike and Microsoft after a failed IT update took computers offline in a global outage that caused a massive operational meltdown at the Atlanta-based carrier.
On Wednesday, Delta CEO Ed Bastian placed the blame for the meltdown squarely at the doors of CrowdStrike and Microsoft and claimed the resulting chaos had cost his airline at least $500 million.
In the aftermath of the outage, Delta was forced to cancel more than 5,000 flights over a five-day period – nearly four times as many flights as American Airlines and United canceled during the same period combined.
Bastian says the airline had to manually reset 40,000 servers and that apart from providing free technical advice, CrowdStrike is yet to offer Delta any monetary compensation for the damage the failed software update caused.
Delta is sticking firmly to the line that its operational meltdown was CrowdStrike’s doing, and the airline has refused to answer why it was so badly affected compared to its rivals.
Now, the airline has brought in leading attorney David Boies to pursue damages against CrowdStrike and Microsoft, although no lawsuit has yet been filed. It’s not known whether Delta will demand CrowdStrike covers its entire $500 million bill from the flight disruptions which also covers the costs of providing hotels and covering expenses for impacted passengers.
“We have to protect our shareholders,” Bastian told CNBC on Wednesday. “We have to protect our customers, our employees, for the damage, not just to the cost of it, but to the brand, the reputational damage,” Bastian added.
Delta’s woes can be traced back to a critical crew scheduling tool that was taken offline during the outage. When engineers managed to bring the system back up and running, it was unable to cope with all the schedule and crew changes, and a backlog quickly built up.
As a result, crew and planes quickly ended up out of position, and Delta lost track of where everything was. As a result, the airline ended up cancelling and delaying thousands of flights until its crew scheduling team could get on top of the workload.
Delta could have potentially prevented the outage by testing the CrowdStrike update first before pushing it to the network, but Bastian said on Wednesday that CrowdStrike had been given “priority access to the Delta ecosystem”.
There’s no question that Delta, other airlines and other industries suffered tremendous losses and good will as a result of Crowdcrap and Microsoft’s negligence. I would think that this outage could be considered a force majeure and not negligence on behalf of the companies who suffered the outage. Yes, they hired these companies to do a job for them. I hope that all of the industries affected by these two companies will sue their brains (and wallets) out. When Delta and Northwest merged, Delta tested the numerous conversion software on static data. They ran the conversion software and corrected the errors. They then re-ran the corrected software on NEW static data and corrected those errors. Then, when the final software conversion was run on “live data” in the middle of the night, only a “handful” of items had to be corrected manually. When the power station failure caused Delta’s system to crash, the company was up and running in about 36 hours. As a result, Delta built a complete redundant computer system on a different power source in a location miles away. So, hopefully Delta and other companies will learn from this and build their own software to hold themselves and themselves ONLY for any breakdowns.
Boies is a good way into his 80s. Hopefully he’s not doing the bulk of the work on this.