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Delta CEO Ed Bastian recently told CNBC that the airline plans to seek damages over the massive disruption, adding that ‘we have no choice’.
The Crowdstrike outage is over, but it brought lingering damages for many businesses around the world, including Delta Air Lines.
The airline was hit particularly badly by the global disruption and was forced to cancel more than 5,000 flights as a result. Speaking to the CNBC programme ‘Squawk Box’, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the incident will cost the company $500m.
The CEO said this figure is not just from the lost revenue, but the “tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels” that the airline had to pay over a period of five days. A spokesperson told CNBC that the number of refund and reimbursement requests Delta has received is in the thousands.
Bastian said Delta will be seeking damages over the incident and added that “we have no choice”.
“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,” Bastian said. “You can’t come into a mission critical 24/7 operation and tell us we have a bug.”
Bastian also said that Delta was hit the hardest as it was more involved with Crowdstrike and Microsoft than others in the industry.
“People don’t realise Microsoft and Crowdstrike are the top two competitors around cyber with each other, so they don’t necessarily partner at the same level that we need them too,” he said.
Neither Crowdstrike nor Microsoft responded to requests for comment from CNBC regarding Delta’s plans to seek damages.
The Crowdstrike outage occurred on 19 July and spiralled into a global crisis, with various sectors such as airlines, banking and healthcare being disrupted by the IT issue. It was quickly linked to a flawed cybersecurity update from Crowdstrike and by the afternoon, the company had issued a fix and assured users that it was not a cyberattack.
After nearly a week, the company said nearly all of the affected Windows devices were back online. But the impact was significant – a report published that same week found that one in four Fortune 500 companies were impacted by the outage – which cost them an estimated $5.4bn.
The outage was also exploited by cyberattackers, who tried to trick those affected by the outage to launch their own malware campaigns by pretending to offer a fix.
The disruption created concerns among IT experts about the danger of similar events happening again, particularly with the dominance of both Microsoft and Crowdstrike in the cybersecurity market. Recent data suggests Microsoft and Crowdstrike took roughly 55pc of the world’s security software sales last year.
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