Washington, 5 August 2024 (TDI): CrowdStrike has rejected a claim by Delta Air Lines that it should be blamed for flight disruptions following a July 19 global outage sparked by a faulty update, and said it had minimal potential liability.
Ed Bastian, Delta CEO, said last week the outage had cost the US airline 500 million dollars and that it planned to take legal action to get compensation from the cyber security firm.
CrowdStrike reiterated its apology to the airline operator, but said in a letter that it is highly disappointed by Delta’s suggestion that CrowdStrike acted inappropriately and strongly rejects any allegation that it committed misconduct or was grossly negligent.
Delta canceled more than six thousand flights over a six-day period, impacting more than 500,000 passengers. It faces a US Transportation Department probe into why it took so much longer for it to recover from the outage than other airlines.
The letter said that any liability by CrowdStrike is contractually capped at an amount in the single-digit millions.
Within hours of the incident, CrowdStrike reached out to Delta to offer help.
Moreover, CrowdStrike’s CEO personally reached out to Delta’s CEO to offer onsite assistance, but received no response, the letter said.
Bastian said last week that CrowdStrike had offered “free consulting advice to help us.”
Delta informed US lawmakers in a letter that CrowdStrike’s faulty update impacted more than half of Delta computers, including many of Delta’s workstations at every airport in the Delta network.
The letter added Delta’s complex IT system which distributes and synchronizes all the data, including the data that feeds crew tracking and gating software, needed manual recovery.
The CrowdStrike letter added that if Delta files suit, it will require to answer why Delta’s competitors, facing similar issues, all restored operations much faster and why Delta turned down free onsite assistance from CrowdStrike professionals who helped many other customers to restore operations much more quickly than Delta.
