his Friday, Delta Air Lines filed a lawsuit against CrowdStrike under the state of Georgia, where they accused CrowdStrike of breaching the contract.
Crowdstrike is a security software vendor that in July 2024, suffered an outage that took down millions of computers and also led to 7000 flight cancellations. Delta Air Lines holding responsible Crowdstirke for what had happened and also accusing them of negligence.
Unfortunately for Delta Air Lines, the outage cost them $380 million in revenue and brought $170 million in costs. The software update affected all computers that had Microsoft Windows as their operating system, leaving the airline company with thousands of cancellations.
David Boise of the Boise Schiller Flexner, the law firm hired by Delta Air Lines, asked for damages in order to cover their losses as well as litigation costs and punitive damages.
“CrowdStrike caused a global catastrophe because it cut corners, took shortcuts, and circumvented the very testing and certification processes it advertised, for its own benefit and profit,” wrote Delta in the complaint. “If CrowdStrike had tested the Faulty Update on even one computer before deployment, the computer would have crashed.”.
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Even more so, Delta had already disabled automatic updates from Crowdstrike, yet the update reached their computers anyway. Crowdstrike's Falcon software reached an unauthorized door in the Windows operating system and acted without Delta’s knowledge. The airline company also said that it would never have authorized this update.
“The havoc that was created deserves, in my opinion, to be fully compensated for,” said Ed Bastian, Delta’s CEO to CNBC. George Kurtz, CEO of Crowdstrike, has already apologized for the incident and said that the company is committed to modifying its practices in order to prevent similar events.
“While we aimed to reach a business resolution that puts customers first, Delta has chosen a different path,” said a spokesperson from Crowdstrike in an email for CNBC, and that “Delta’s claims are based on disproven misinformation, demonstrate a lack of understanding of how modern cybersecurity works, and reflect a desperate attempt to shift blame for its slow recovery away from its failure to modernize its antiquated IT infrastructure.”.
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