Delta CEO Ed Bastian said the recent global technology disruption cost his company $500 million after the airline suffered major flight delays and cancellations.
“It cost us half a billion dollars,” Bastian said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“Over a five-day period, between not only the lost revenue but also the tens of millions of dollars a day in compensation and hotels and — we did everything we could to take care of our customers during that time,” Bastian said.
Although several airlines experienced technology issues at the time of the July 19 outage, Delta faced a large number of cancellations in the following days.
The mass cancellations drew scrutiny from the Department of Transportation, with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg saying officials intended to ensure Delta was “following the law and taking care of its passengers.”
The global outage was linked to an update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that crashed computers running Windows software. Although the cyber company implemented a quick solution, it took long periods for affected customers to recover.
Thousands of Delta flights were canceled or delayed in the days following the outage.
When asked Wednesday about the possibility of suing over the outage, Bastian told CNBC, “We have no choice.”
“If you want to have access, priority access, to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you need to test these things, you need to… you can’t go into a mission-critical, 24/7 operation and tell us, ‘We have a bug,’” he said. “It does not work.”
In a statement emailed to The Hill, a CrowdStrike spokesperson said the company was “aware of the report but was not aware of a lawsuit and had no further comment.”
Microsoft did not immediately return a request for comment.
Delta announced July 24 that its operations returned almost completely to normal, with zero mainline flights canceled.
Updated: 3:03 p.m.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
