Written by via indianexpress.com
The global outage of Microsoft Windows PCs last month due to a faulty Crowdstrike update continues to have repercussions as Delta Airlines is now mulling legal action against the two tech companies.
Ed Bastian, the CEO of the US-based airlines, said that they are looking to recover their losses caused by the outage, according to a report by CNBC. On July 18, Windows PC systems started crashing and it later emerged that the probable root cause was a botched update issued by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. The fallout from the outage was massive as banks, hospitals, news outlets, restaurants, and several other businesses across the world were impacted.
However, airlines and airports saw the most disruption in services with flights getting either delayed or cancelled, leaving thousands of passengers stranded.
What did Delta’s CEO say?
In the days following the outage, more than 5,000 flights were reportedly cancelled by the carrier. The downtime cost the company about $500 million as it had to manually reset 40,000 servers, Bastian said in an interview with CNBC.
Furthermore, Delta Airlines is being probed by the US Transportation Department which is looking into why the carrier took longer than other airlines to resume operations after the outage.
Criticising Microsoft and Crowdstrike, Bastian said, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?” However, it must be noted that Apple’s services such as iCloud have suffered disruptions in the past. He also called the Delta staff’s efforts to get systems running again as “nothing short of heroic” and offered each employee two free flight tickets.
How has Crowdstrike responded to Delta?
In its apology to Delta Airlines, Crowdstrike said that it was “highly disappointed by Delta’s suggestion that CrowdStrike acted inappropriately and strongly rejects any allegation that it was grossly negligent or committed misconduct.”
“Any liability by CrowdStrike is contractually capped at an amount in the single-digit millions,” the company was quoted as saying, adding that it had offered the carrier assistance within hours of the incident.