CrowdStrike Sued by Airmen After Major Outage Halted Air Travel

By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) – CrowdStrike’s legal troubles over last month’s massive global computer outage deepened on Monday when the cybersecurity company was sued by travelers whose flights were delayed or canceled.

In a proposed class action lawsuit filed in federal court in Austin, Texas, three flyers blamed CrowdStrike’s negligence in testing and deploying its software for the outage, which also disrupted banks, hospitals and emergency lines around the world.

The plaintiffs said that as passengers scrambled to reach their destinations, many spent hundreds of dollars on lodging, meals and alternative travel, while others missed work or suffered health problems from having to sleep on the airport floor.

They said CrowdStrike should pay compensatory and punitive damages to anyone whose flight was disrupted, after technology-related flight groundings for Southwest Airlines and other carriers in 2023 made the disruption “entirely foreseeable.”

CrowdStrike said in a statement: “We believe this case lacks merit and will vigorously defend the company.”

It provided an identical statement in response to a shareholder lawsuit filed on July 31, after the company’s share price fell by about a third.

The outage resulted from a faulty software update that crashed more than 8 million computers.

Delta Air Lines said it may take legal action against Austin-based CrowdStrike after it canceled more than 6,000 flights at a cost of about $500 million.

On Sunday, CrowdStrike said it was neither negligent nor at fault for Delta’s problems, and that the Atlanta-based airline did not accept its offer of help.

Delta faces a U.S. Department of Transportation investigation into why it needed more time than its rivals to recover from the outage.

Monday’s case is del Rio et al. v CrowdStrike Inc, U.S. District Court, Western District of Texas, No.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy)