Delta Airlines is suing CrowdStrike for $500 million in damages

Delta Airlines sued CrowdStrike for negligence that led to Microsoft’s global outage on July 19.

The $500 million lawsuit seeks to recover $380 million in lost revenue and $170 million in additional costs.

CrowdStrike called the claims misinformed.

Delta Airlines filed a lawsuit against CrowdStrike, accusing him of negligence and breach of contractwhich led to financial losses for the airlines. What is now called a Black Swan event, a bug in a CrowdSrik update led to blocking 8.5 million Microsoft devices globally.

Airlines were one of the most affected sectors, leading to thousands of flight cancellations. Delta Airlines was also caught in the jacuzzi. Now he has decided to sue CrowdStrike.

According to the company, its revenue was reduced by $380 million and it had to bear an additional cost of $170 million to recover from the system outages. More than 7,000 flights were canceled in the process, affecting 1.3 million passengers.

Delta accused CrowdStrike of taking shortcuts and ignoring the testing and certification processes for his profit. It said that if the company had rolled out the update to a single computer first, it would have known about the bug. This might have prevented the catastrophe that followed.

Another claim Delta made is that the CrowdStrike update ran on its system, even though the company did automatic updates blocked. According to the airline, the software created and exploited an unauthorized backdoor in Windows.

“The havoc that has been created deserves, in my opinion, to be fully compensated” – Delta CEO Ed Bastian

CrowdStrike apologized for the interruption and assured that nothing of the kind would happen in the future. Microsoft also hosted a The September 10 Security Summitwhere he shared his learnings from the incident and ways to strengthen system security.

CrowdStrike’s response

CrowdStrike leaned heavily on Delta in its response. He called the process a desperate attempt by Delta to shift the blame for their own shortcomings. According to the IT company, Delta has failed to modernize its IT infrastructurewhich he described as “ancient”

Now, that statement has some substance to it.

Delta had an outage in August 2018 that resulted in more than 2,300 flight cancellations and approximately $150 million in losses — however, this had nothing to do with CrowdStrike.

This suggests that there might be technological problems within the company which must be addressed definitively. But since that incident, Delta has invested heavily in IT infrastructure and claims to have some of the best technology in the airline industry.

“While we sought to reach a business resolution that put customers first, Delta chose a different path” – CrowdStrike

According to CrowdStrike, this one contacted Delta for an out-of-court settlement after the incident. However, there was no response from the airline. CrowdStrike also said Delta doesn’t understand how the cybersecurity space works, which is why its lawsuit is full of misinformation.

It remains to be seen how this process plays out and whether the courts hold the IT company liable for the catastrophe.