Delta Airlines Seeking Damages From Crowdstrike and Microsoft After Outage

Delta Airlines has announced that they will be seeking damages after last week's massive IT outage, which was caused by a faulty update from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.

Last Friday, global systems took a massive hit after millions of computers went down when Windows crashed due to a faulty Crowdstrike update, and the aviation industry was one of the worst hit. Airlines were forced to cancel thousands of flights, with American airlines being affected the most. American, United, and Delta, the United States' major three carriers, were devastated, and Delta in particular struggled to recover. The airline was forced to cancel over 5,000 flights over five days and reboot over 40,000 servers across the country.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian reported that the outage had cost them upwards of $500 million, including canceled flights, travel vouchers, compensation to customers, and hotel bookings for stranded travelers. Meanwhile, the United States Department of Transportation has launched an investigation into their handling of the situation after hundreds of complaints over Delta's recovery from the IT outage.

Due to this, Bastian stated that Delta had no choice but to seek damages, and will be looking for compensation from both Microsoft and Crowdstrike. They have hired prominent law firm Boies Schiller Flexner for the upcoming case, but Crowdstrike stated that they were not aware of any sort of lawsuit. David Boies, the founder of the firm, is known for representing the government in their successful antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, meaning that the two have a history.

This also comes just as Crowdstrike is facing another lawsuit from their shareholders. They are seeking damages after the outage, making allegations that the cybersecurity company defrauded them by hiding the fact that they failed to properly test their new software before releasing it. Crowdstrike has dismissed the case, claiming that it has no grounds, but they could be facing more lawsuits in the future over the global IT outage.