Delta CEO Blames Microsoft, CrowdStrike for $500 Million Outage

On a interview with CNBC, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the July 19 outage caused by a CrowdStrike update cost his company half a billion dollars in five days. Delta canceled more than 5,000 flights that weekend and still had blue error screens visible at airports days after the initial crash. Among the costs Bastian said Delta incurred were more than 40,000 servers that “we had to physically tap and restart,” as well as compensation payments to travelers left in the lurch.

Asked about an ongoing relationship with Microsoft after the crash, Bastian said he considers it “probably the most fragile platform” and asked the question: “When was the last time you heard about a major outage at Apple?” He placed some blame on the valuations of big tech companies, which have lately been lifted by the generative AI hype, saying: “…they are building the future and they have to make sure they strengthen the present.”

Delta is not alone – CrowdStrike shareholders file a proposal for collective action this week, reports Reuters. The process cites CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz’s comments on a March 5 conference call that its software has been “validated, tested and certified.” Shareholders now consider these claims to be false and misleading, as CrowdStrike was not performing the same level of testing on Quick Response Content updates as it does on other updates, and its Content Validator checks did not detect the bug that caused the global collapse of IT.

As described in Tom Warren’s recap of the 19th’s events, unlike Microsoft, Apple has in recent years restricted third-party developers’ access to the macOS kernel. A Microsoft spokesperson I told Wall Street Journal that “it cannot legally block its operating system in the same way that Apple does due to an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint”. The European Commission disagrees, saying On the edge“Microsoft is free to decide on its business model and to adapt its security infrastructure to respond to threats, as long as this is done in compliance with EU competition law.”

Bastian also mocked the flaw that caused the issue and CrowdStrike’s deployment processes, saying: “If you want priority access to the Delta ecosystem… you need to test this. You can’t go into a mission-critical, 24/7 operation and tell us, ‘We have a bug.’ Does not work.”