Microsoft says Delta ignored Satya Nadella’s CrowdStrike offer of help

Microsoft has responded to Delta Air Lines’ criticism of Windows and CrowdStrike following last month’s massive IT outage. Delta CEO Ed Bastian wants compensation from CrowdStrike and Microsoft for the estimated $500 million Delta lost due to the outage. Now Microsoft says Delta refused its free help on multiple occasions and even ignored an email from CEO Satya Nadella to Bastian.

“Microsoft empathizes with Delta and its customers regarding the impact of the CrowdStrike incident. But your letter and Delta’s public comments are incomplete, false, misleading, and harmful to Microsoft and its reputation,” says Mark Cheffo, co-chair of Dechert’s global litigation practice, in a letter on Microsoft’s behalf to Delta’s lawyers.

The letter, included below, aims to paint a very different picture of the incident following Bastian’s comments in a interview with CNBC last week. Bastian called Microsoft fragile and asked, “When was the last time you heard of a major outage at Apple?” He also revealed that more than 40,000 of the company’s servers were hit by the faulty CrowdStrike update. Microsoft’s letter suggests that Delta’s problems may be much deeper than the Windows server outage.

“Even though Microsoft software did not cause the CrowdStrike incident, Microsoft immediately stepped in and offered to help Delta free of charge following the July 19 outage,” Cheffo’s letter says. “Every day thereafter, from July 19 to July 23, Microsoft employees repeated their offers to help Delta. Each time, Delta declined Microsoft’s offers of assistance, even though Microsoft did not charge Delta for this assistance.”

Microsoft also claims that an employee contacted Delta on July 22 to offer any help the airline needed, but a Delta employee responded that everything was “fine” on the same day that Delta canceled more than 1,100 flights, followed by another 500 cancellations the next day. .

“More senior Microsoft executives also repeatedly reached out to help their colleagues at Delta, again with similar results,” writes Cheffo. “Among others, on Wednesday, July 24, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent an email to Delta CEO Ed Bastian, who never responded.”

Bastian may well have missed that email from Nadella because he was busy flying to the Paris Olympics, as Delta is the official airline of Team USA. Among all the flight cancellations following the CrowdStrike outage, Delta had to fight to fulfill Team USA’s obligations to get athletes to Paris on time.

Microsoft believes that Delta refused its free help because it was actually struggling to restore non-Windows systems. “It is quickly becoming apparent that Delta likely refused Microsoft’s help because the IT system it was having the most trouble restoring – its crew tracking and scheduling system – was being serviced by other technology vendors, such as IBM , because it works on these providers’ systems. systems, not Microsoft Windows or Azure,” says Microsoft’s letter.

This suggests that Delta was hit by the CrowdStrike outage on its Windows systems and that these failures impacted its IT infrastructure that was serviced by IBM and others. Microsoft says Delta “apparently has not modernized its IT infrastructure,” so it was more impacted by the CrowdStrike outage than rivals like American Airlines or United Airlines.

Like CrowdStrike, Microsoft is also asking Delta to preserve documents related to the CrowdStrike outage. She also wants the airline to maintain everything related to the disruption of its crew tracking and scheduling systems that run on a mix of IBM, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Kyndryl and other technologies. Microsoft says it “will vigorously defend itself in any litigation if Delta decides to pursue this path.”

Earlier this week, CrowdStrike also stated that it is not to blame for Delta’s days interruption and said that Delta also refused its assistance on the ground. CrowdStrike’s comments now make more sense following Microsoft’s suggestion that the problems at Delta could be much deeper than Windows systems being disabled by the faulty CrowdStrike update. Unlike other airlines, Delta has struggled to bring systems back online and is currently being investigated by the US Department of Transportation about how it handles recovery efforts.