The CEO of Delta Air Lines says the massive CrowdStrike outage that hobbled its flight operations earlier this month, , has cost the airline as much as $500 million.
The outage hit Delta harder than most of its competitors. The airline was forced to cancel more than 5,000 flights as a result of the outage, which stymied businesses worldwide when a failed software update from CrowdStrike, a major cybersecurity firm, crashed operations for millions of users running Microsoft Windows devices.
Speaking on CNBC on Wednesday, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said the airline is now preparing for litigation as it looks to recover from the outage.
鈥淲e have no choice,鈥� about potential action against CrowdStrike. 鈥淲e鈥檙e not looking to wipe them out, but we鈥檙e looking to make certain that we get compensated however they decide to for what they cost us. Half a billion dollars in five days.鈥�
In released earlier this month, Bastian said the software outage hit on what was the 鈥渂usiest travel weekend of the summer鈥� for the airline with the nation's third largest fleet size. It caused massive disruption to Delta's crew-tracking system, a mission critical tool used to pair pilots and flight attendants with flights.
During his interview with CNBC, Bastian said Delta was heavily reliant on CrowdStrike and Microsoft for its cybersecurity. 鈥淲e鈥檙e by far the heaviest in the industry with both, and so we got hit the hardest in terms of the recovery capability,鈥� he said.
To help get back online, the company had to manually reset 40,000 servers, according to Bastian.
He said the Atlanta-based carrier is now back up and running and over the last seven days has had less than 100 cancellations in aggregate over 30,000 flights. Still, Delta has been left to recover from both a massive financial and reputational hit. It also faces by the U.S. Department of Transportation over its response to the outage.
No suit has yet been filed by Delta, but Bastian鈥檚 comments could portend the start of a wave of litigation against CrowdStrike for the outage. Delta has already hired the prominent litigator David Boies, chairman of the firm Boies Schiller Flexner, in advance of a potential lawsuit, according to a source familiar with the decision who was not authorized to speak publicly.
鈥淚f you鈥檙e going to be having access, priority access to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you鈥檝e got to test the stuff. You can鈥檛 come into a mission-critical 24/7 operation and tell us we have a bug,鈥� Bastian told CNBC.
In a statement, a spokesperson for CrowdStrike said, 鈥淲e are aware of the reporting, but have no knowledge of a lawsuit and have no further comment."
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