Travelers wait in line as the flight board shows delays on the check-in floor of the Delta Air Lines terminal at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on July 23, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
CrowdStrike he said on Sunday Delta Air Lines had rejected on-the-ground aid during last month’s massive shutdown that caused thousands of flight cancellations.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last week that the mass cancellations after the outage, which occurred during one of the busiest times of the year, cost the company about $500 million, including of customer compensation. The airline has “no choice” but to seek compensation, he said.
Bastian told staff on Friday that the airline notified CrowdStrike and Microsoft that the company “planned to pursue legal claims” to recover its losses arising from the shutdown and that it had hired the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.
In response, Michael Carlinsky, CrowdStrike’s attorney and co-managing partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, wrote to Delta’s attorney, David Boies, on Sunday that Delta’s threats of legal action “contributed to a misleading narrative that CrowdStrike is responsible about Delta’s IT decisions and response to the outage. .”
He said CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz reached out to Bastian to “offer on-the-spot assistance, but received no response.”
Delta canceled more than 5,000 flights between the July 19 outage caused by a botched software update and July 25, more than its competitors.
CrowdStrike shares have lost more than 36% of their value since the outage affected millions of computers running the company’s software on top of Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The outage hit industries from banking, healthcare and air travel.
“If Delta follows this path, Delta will have to explain to the public, to its shareholders and ultimately to a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions — promptly, transparently and constructively — while Delta did not,” Carlinsky’s letter said.
He said Delta should retain a number of documents, including those describing its IT infrastructure, IT business continuity plans and its handling of outages over the past five years.
CrowdStrike’s contractual liability is limited to single-digit millions, the letter said. Delta did not comment on the letter Sunday night. In a separate statement, CrowdStrike said it hoped “Delta will agree to work cooperatively to find a solution.”
“We’ve done everything we can to take care of our customers during this time,” Bastian said in Wednesday’s “Squawk Box” interview. “If you’re going to have access, priority access, to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you have to test this stuff. You can’t come to a critical mission 24/7 and tell us we have a bug it’s not working.”
CrowdStrike promised to release future software updates gradually in a preliminary report following the incident.
On July 30, CrowdStrike shareholders filed a lawsuit against the company in a Texas federal court and sought damages for reductions in their investments.
CrowdStrike reports second quarter financial results on August 28. A Microsoft representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
