Delta Airlines planes are seen parked at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on June 19, 2024 in Seattle, Washington.
Kent Nishimura | Getty Images
Microsoft shot back at Delta Air Lines on Tuesday after the carrier said it would seek compensation from the software giant and CrowdStrike for thousands of flight cancellations after the massive IT outage.
Delta has had a harder time than rival airlines in recovering from the outage, canceling more than 5,000 flights in the days after the July 19 incident, which was caused by a botched software update by CrowdStrike and affected millions of Microsoft Windows computers.
It cost the carrier about $500 million, CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last week, adding that the airline, which prides itself on punctuality and positions itself as a premium airline, “had no choice.” rather than taking legal action against the two. technology companies.
Mark Cheffo, a Dechert partner representing Microsoft, sent a letter Tuesday to attorney David Boies of Boies Schiller Flexner. Boies represents Delta and had sent letters on behalf of the airline to CrowdStrike and Microsoft.
“We have reason to believe that Microsoft did not comply with contractual requirements and acted grossly negligently, indeed willfully, with respect to the flawed update” from CrowdStrike that crashed Windows PCs, Boies told Microsoft’s chief legal officer , Hossein. Nowbar, in a letter dated July 29.
Cheffo wrote in his response that Microsoft sympathizes with Delta and its customers on the impact of the CrowdStrike incident. “But your letter and Delta’s public comments are incomplete, false, misleading and damaging to Microsoft and its reputation,” he said.
The response is similar to CrowdStrike’s letter on Sunday rejecting the Atlanta-based airline’s claims. Cheffo wrote that Microsoft offered to help Delta for free. Every day from July 19 to July 23, Microsoft employees said they could help, but Delta turned them away, according to the letter.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Bastian, “who never responded,” Cheffo wrote. CrowdStrike also said its CEO George Kurtz had reached out to his Delta counterpart “but received no response.”
Cheffo described a July 22 letter from Microsoft to a Delta employee offering help. The Delta employee replied, “That’s fine. Cool will let you know and thank you.”
Delta executives said the outage, which led to more cancellations than in all of 2019, overwhelmed its crew scheduling platform that matches crews with flights. But Cheffo said Delta doesn’t rely on Windows or Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.
In 2021, IBM announced a multi-year agreement with Delta to help it implement a hybrid cloud architecture running on Red Hat’s OpenShift software. In 2022, Amazon he said Delta had chosen the digital commerce company’s Amazon Web Services unit as its preferred cloud provider.
“It’s quickly becoming apparent that Delta likely declined Microsoft’s help because the IT system that was having the most trouble in the recovery — the crew scheduling and tracking system — was serviced by other technology providers, such as IBM, because it runs on those providers.” systems, and not Microsoft Windows or Azure,” Cheffo wrote in his letter.
Bastian said last week Delta had to manually reset 40,000 servers.
Microsoft requires Delta to keep records showing how many technologies it has sourced IBM, Amazon and others contributed to the airline’s issues from July 19 to July 24, Cheffo wrote. Representatives for IBM and Amazon did not immediately comment.
Cheffo said Microsoft is still trying to figure out why American Airlines, united airlines and others managed to recover faster than their opponent.
“Our preliminary review shows that Delta, unlike its competitors, apparently has not modernized its IT infrastructure, either for the benefit of its customers or its pilots and flight attendants,” Cheffo wrote.
Delta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bastian told CNBC last week: “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 mission-critical 24/7 operation and tell us that we have an error.
