CrowdStrike says it isn't to blame for Delta's flight cancellations after outage
CrowdStrike denied responsibility for Delta Air Lines' flight cancellations, which cost $500 million. Delta plans legal action, while CrowdStrike's liability is limited to under $10 million amid stock decline.
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CrowdStrike has denied responsibility for the flight cancellations experienced by Delta Air Lines following a significant outage in July. Delta's CEO, Ed Bastian, estimated that the cancellations, which exceeded 5,000 flights, cost the airline around $500 million. He indicated that Delta plans to pursue legal action to recover these losses. CrowdStrike's attorney stated that Delta declined onsite assistance during the outage, which was attributed to a faulty software update. The attorney emphasized that CrowdStrike's liability is limited to under $10 million, contrasting sharply with Delta's estimated losses.
In a letter to Delta's legal team, CrowdStrike's lawyer criticized Delta's claims, suggesting that the airline's threats of litigation misrepresented the situation and implied that CrowdStrike was responsible for Delta's IT decisions. CrowdStrike's CEO had previously offered assistance to Delta but received no response. The letter also indicated that if Delta proceeds with legal action, it would need to justify its decisions to the public and potentially a jury.
CrowdStrike has faced a significant decline in its stock value since the incident, with shareholders filing a lawsuit seeking damages for investment losses. The company plans to release future software updates in stages to prevent similar issues. Delta has not publicly commented on the letter from CrowdStrike's attorney.
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9 commentsif CrowdStrike isn't to blame, then who is?
If push comes to shove, Delta can sue and/or stop using the product.
This is ultimately a question of contracts, liability limits— particularly if Delta secured consequential damages.
SaaS contracts are designed to defaulted to NOT allow a customer to pursue consequential damages remedies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequential_damages
This is a question of CrowdStrike’s Deal Desk contracting hygiene.
Deal Desks are the joint finance-legal-sales teams that work on enterprise contracts in scaled enterprise SaaS startups.
This is a SaaS CFOs nightmare.
But Delta for having terrible investment in modernizing their IT infrastructure.
This is very likely to settle out of court or dropped once the CS outage falls out of the news cycle.
Should Delta pursue this path, Delta will have to explain.. why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions—swiftly, transparently, and constructively while Delta did not.. Delta would have to preserve a series of documents, including those describing its information-technology infrastructure, IT business continuity plans and its handling of outages in the past five years
If only some smart tech people gathered somewhere and someone could make a mobile app to allow crew to set their status and location instantly. They’d corner the market and save airlines billions.
Society still blames the match based on recent legal outcomes, so Delta will probably win the argument.
It was no secret CrowdStrike updated all PCs at once. Delta could see that. It is no secret updates can nuke computers. Delta knew this could happen.
All business should have a plan for cascading/total outages.
This was a great test of humanity that Delta seems to have failed.
Deltas total incompetence makes me feel like CrowdStrike incompetence is canceled out. Delta's CEO clearly has no idea what he is talking about.
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