Delta Air Lines is Fighting CrowdStrike: CEO Ed Bastian Revives the U.S. Air Transportation Outage During the July 19th Outage

In an interview with CNBC, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the July 19th outage caused by a CrowdStrike update cost his company half a billion dollars in five days. Blue error screens at airports still visible days after the initial crash, as Delta canceled more than 5,000 flights that weekend. Among the costs Bastian said Delta incurred were more than 40,000 servers that “we had to physically touch and reset” as well as compensation payments to travelers left in the lurch.

“We have no choice,” Bastian said about potential action against CrowdStrike. We don’t want them to get wiped out, but we do want to make sure that we are compensated for what they cost us. Half a billion dollars in five days.”

The software glitch hit on what was the busiest travel weekend of the summer for the airline with the nation’s third largest fleet size. It caused massive disruption to Delta’s crew-tracking system, a mission critical tool used to pair pilots and flight attendants with flights.

He said the Atlanta-based carrier is now back up and running and over the last seven days has had less than 100 cancellations in aggregate over 30,000 flights. Still, Delta has been left to recover from both a massive financial and reputational hit. There is an investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation into its handling of the problem.

Delta has yet to file a lawsuit, but Bastian’s comments could indicate the start of a wave of litigation against CrowdStrike. Delta has already hired the prominent litigator David Boies, chairman of the firm Boies Schiller Flexner, in advance of a potential lawsuit, according to a source familiar with the decision who was not authorized to speak publicly.

“If you’re going to be having access, priority access to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you’ve got to test the stuff. You can’t come into a mission-critical 24/7 operation and tell us we have a bug,” Bastian told CNBC.

Asked about a continuing relationship with Microsoft after the crash, Bastian said he regards it as “probably the most fragile platform” and asked the question, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?” He said that the valuations of big tech companies were to blame, because they were building the future and had to make sure they fortify the current.

Delta isn’t alone — CrowdStrike shareholders filed a proposed class action lawsuit this week, reports Reuters. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on March 5th that his software was valid, tested, and certified. CrowdStrike didn’t do the same level of testing on the Rapid Response Content update as it does on other updates, and its Content Validator checks missed the bug that caused the global IT crash.

As described in Tom Warren’s recap of the events on the 19th, unlike Microsoft, Apple has in recent years restricted the access third-party developers have to the kernel of macOS. A Microsoft spokesperson said to The Wall Street Journal that it “cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint.” The European Commission disagrees, telling The Verge, “Microsoft is free to decide on its business model and to adapt its security infrastructure to respond to threats provided this is done in line with EU competition law.”