CrowdStrike lashes out at Delta and calls its lawsuit 'meritless' after it reportedly rejected 'free onsite help' leading to half a billion flight disruption losses

CrowdStrike says it is "highly disappointed by Delta's suggestion that CrowdStrike acted inappropriately and strongly rejects any allegation that it was grossly negligent or committed misconduct."

What you need to know

• CrowdStrike fires back at Delta Air Lines after the airline company indicated it will seek damages amounting to $500 million.
• The cybersecurity firm says Delta's lawsuit is 'meritless' and would prefer to work cooperatively with Delta to find a solution.
• Delta reportedly didn't respond to CrowdStrike's free onsite IT consultation offer during the outage.

The digital pandemic caused by a faulty CrowdStrike kernel driver continues to brew more trouble. Last week, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian indicated the company lost $500 million in five days due to flight cancellations, reimbursements, and more. The executive stated that the company was moving to court and had already hired a bigshot attorney, David Boies to seek damages from Microsoft and CrowdStrike for the damages incurred.

Delta's CEO indicated the company might rethink its partnership with Microsoft and CrowdStrike citing fortification concerns. "When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?" added the CEO. While a veteran Microsoft Software Engineer recently explained the cause of the global outage that left 8.5 million Windows devices with BSoD errors for hours (potentially exonerating Microsoft from blame) the tech giant can't seem to catch a break.

In the past few weeks, blame for the digital pandemic has been shifted across CrowdStrike and Microsoft. However, CrowdStrike blatantly indicates that it's not to blame for the outage that toppled Microsoft's services, leaving thousands of passengers stranded across airports (via The Wall Street Journal).

Who caused the global IT outage? CrowdStrike says it's not at fault

CrowdStrike logo (Image credit: CrowdStrike)

In the apology letter addressed to the airline, CrowdStrike indicated it's "highly disappointed by Delta's suggestion that CrowdStrike acted inappropriately and strongly rejects any allegation that it was grossly negligent or committed misconduct."

“If you’re going to have priority access to the Delta ecosystem... you’ve gotta test this stuff. You can’t come into a mission-critical, 24-7 operation and tell us, ‘We have a bug.’ It doesn’t work,” indicated Delta CEO Ed Bastian in an interview with CNBC. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz indicated he reached out to Bastian within hours of the outage and offered onsite assistance, but didn't receive a response. Technically, Bastian confirmed Kurtz's claims when he indicated that CrowdStrike had offered "free IT consultation advice."

CrowdStrike admitted the faulty update affected "more than half of Delta computers, including many of Delta’s workstations at every airport in the Delta network." The cybersecurity firm describes Delta's IT system as "complex," prompting manual recovery.

A CrowdStrike spokesman indicated that the company hopes Delta Air Lines will consider working together to find a plausible solution for the emerging issues. "Public posturing about potentially bringing a meritless lawsuit against CrowdStrike as a long-time partner is not constructive to any party," the spokesman added.

As highlighted in the letter addressed to Delta by CrowdStrike, the airline company will have to answer the following questions if it decides to file the suit in court:

1. Why Delta’s competitors, facing similar challenges, all restored operations much faster?
2. Why Delta turned down free onsite help from CrowdStrike professionals, who assisted many other customers to restore operations much more quickly than Delta?

Finally, the letter states, "any liability by CrowdStrike is contractually capped at an amount in the single-digit millions." It seems no one wants to accept the blame for the massive outage, with the affected parties pointing fingers at each other. Will CrowdStrike's erroneous $10 Uber Eats gift cards and apology be enough to get Delta to back down?

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