Delta Airlines is Back on Business: After the Big Outage At Apple, CrowdStrike Has Learned to Shut Down a Major Airlines System

The outage hit Delta harder than most of its competitors. Due to the disruption caused by the software update from CrowdStrike, the airlines was forced to cancel thousands of flights and businesses were not able to operate.

“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. A 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. A crucial tool used to pair pilots and flight attendants with flights was disrupted.

He said the Atlanta carrier has had more than 30,000 flights canceled over the last seven days and that the carrier is now back up and running. Delta suffered a massive financial and reputational hit. The U.S. Department of Transportation is investigating 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 tell us we have a bug in a mission-critical operation.”

Asked about a continuing relationship with Microsoft after the crash, Bastian said he regards it as “probably the most fragile platform” and asked the question, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?” He placed some blame on the valuations of big tech companies, which lately have been lifted by generative AI hype, saying, “…they’re building the future, and they have to make sure they fortify the current.”

Delta isn’t alone — CrowdStrike shareholders filed a proposed class action lawsuit this week, reports Reuters. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on a call that the software was valid, tested, and certified. CrowdStrike didn’t catch the bug in the global IT crash that caused those claims to be false and misleading, so shareholders now view those claims as false and misleading.

As described in Tom Warren’s recap of the events on the 19th, unlike Microsoft, Apple has in recent years restricted the access third-party developers have to the kernel of macOS. A Microsoft spokesperson said to The Wall Street Journal that it “cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint.” The European Commission disagrees, telling The Verge, “Microsoft is free to decide on its business model and to adapt its security infrastructure to respond to threats provided this is done in line with EU competition law.”