$500M in five days: Delta Air Lines CrowdStrike outage was costly

AUSTIN – The Austin American-Statesman reports that Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Wednesday there is “no choice” but to initiate a lawsuit against Austin-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike after it caused widespread software outages in July that cost the airline $500 million. Having canceled more than 5,000 flights amid the July 19 outage and in its aftermath after a CrowdStrike software update that rendered Microsoft Windows inoperable, Bastian told CNBC on Wednesday that the incident is unacceptable and serves as a catalyst for more collaborative partnerships in the technology industry. “You can’t come into a mission critical 24/7 operation and tell us we have a bug. It doesn’t work,” Bastian said during an interview with CNBC in Paris.

While Delta had not formally filed a lawsuit against CrowdStrike as of Wednesday afternoon, Bastian said there is no other option for the company after its revenue losses and the millions in additional costs during the five days it took the airline to return to normal operations. “We have no choice,” Bastian said. “Between not just the loss of revenue, but the tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels. We did everything we could to take care of our customers over that time.” Coming from an “undetected error” in a software update to the CrowdStrike’s “Falcon Sensor” — an artificial intelligence and machine learning tool to identify and mitigate cybersecurity threats in real time — caused Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death.” In the days after the outage, CrowdStrike published a preliminary post incident review, confirming that the software error was not hostile in nature and had since been identified and fixed.