In an interview with US CNBC, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian stated the July 19th outage caused by a CrowdStrike update cost his company half a billion dollars in 5 days. Delta cancelled more than 5,000 flights that weekend & had blue error screens still visible at airports days after the initial crash.
Amongst the costs Bastian claimed Delta had incurred were more than 40,000 servers that “we had to physically touch & reset” as well as compensation payments to travellers left in the lurch.
Fragile Platform
Asked about a continuing relationship with Microsoft after the crash, Bastian explained he regards it as “probably the most fragile platform” & asked the question, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?” He placed some blame on the valuations of big tech companies, which lately have been lifted by generative AI hype, saying, “…they’re building the future, & they have to make sure they fortify the current.”
Apparently, the only thing offered to Delta so far from the 2 companies was free consulting advice, so it seems their IT dept. wasn’t on the list for one of CrowdStrike’s $10 UberEats cards. CNBC previously reported Delta has hired attorney David Boies to seek damages.
Class Action
Delta isn’t alone — CrowdStrike shareholders filed a proposed class action lawsuit this week, reports Reuters. The suit cites CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz’s comments on a March 5th call that its software was “validated, tested, & certified.”
The shareholders now regard those claims as false & misleading since CrowdStrike was not performing the same level of testing on Rapid Response Content updates as it does on other updates, & its Content Validator checks did not catch the bug that caused the global IT crash.
3rd-Party Developers
As described in Tom Warren’s recap of the events on the 19th, unlike Microsoft, Apple has in recent years restricted the access 3rd-party developers have to the kernel of macOS.
A Microsoft spokesperson said to The Wall Street Journal that it “cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint.”
Business Model
The European Commission disagrees, commenting, “Microsoft is free to decide on its business model & to adapt its security infrastructure to respond to threats provided this is done in line with EU competition law.”
Bastian also derided both the flaw that caused the issue & CrowdStrike’s deployment processes, saying, “If you are going to have priority access to the Delta ecosystem… you’ve gotta test this stuff. You cannot come into a mission-critical, 24-7 operation & tell us, ‘We have a bug.’ It does not work.”
