The CEO of Delta Air Lines says the massive CrowdStrike outage that hobbled its flight operations earlier this month, leaving thousands of passengers stranded, has cost the airline as much as $500 million.
The outage hit Delta harder than most of its competitors. The airline was forced to cancel more than 5,000 flights as a result of the outage, which stymied businesses worldwide when a failed software update from CrowdStrike, a major cybersecurity firm, crashed operations for millions of users running Microsoft Windows devices.
Speaking on CNBC on Wednesday, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said the airline is now preparing for litigation as it looks to recover from the outage.
“We have no choice,” Bastian said about potential action against CrowdStrike. “We’re not looking to wipe them out, but we’re looking to make certain that we get compensated however they decide to for what they cost us. Half a billion dollars in five days.”
In a public letter released earlier this month, Bastian said the software outage 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.
During his interview with CNBC, Bastian said Delta was heavily reliant on CrowdStrike and Microsoft for its cybersecurity. “We’re by far the heaviest in the industry with both, and so we got hit the hardest in terms of the recovery capability,” he said.
To help get back online, the company had to manually reset 40,000 servers, according to Bastian.
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. It also faces an investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation over its response to the outage.
No suit has yet been filed by Delta, but Bastian’s comments could portend the start of a wave of litigation against CrowdStrike for the outage. 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.
In a statement, a spokesperson for CrowdStrike said, “We are aware of the reporting, but have no knowledge of a lawsuit and have no further comment."
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