CrowdStrike on Sunday said Delta Air Lines had refused on-site assistance throughout the massive power outage last month, which resulted in hundreds of flight cancellations.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC's “Squawk Box” last week that the mass cancellations following the outage, which occurred during one in every of the busiest times of the 12 months, cost the corporate about $500 million, including compensation to customers. The airline has “no choice” but to hunt damages, he said.
Bastian told employees on Friday that the airline had informed CrowdStrike and Microsoft that the corporate “plans to take legal action” to recuperate the losses brought on by the facility outage and that it has hired the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.
In response, Michael Carlinsky, CrowdStrike's attorney and co-managing director at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, wrote to Delta's attorney David Boies on Sunday that Delta's threats of litigation “contributed to a misleading narrative that CrowdStrike was responsible for Delta's IT decisions and response to the outage.”
He said CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz reached out to Bastian to “offer on-site assistance but received no response.”
Delta canceled greater than 5,000 flights between the July 19 outage brought on by a botched software update and July 25, greater than its competitors.
CrowdStrike shares have lost greater than 36 percent of their value since outages affected tens of millions of computers running the corporate's software on Microsoft's Windows operating system. The outages hit industries starting from banking to healthcare to aviation.
“If Delta takes this path, Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders and ultimately a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions – quickly, transparently and constructively – but Delta did not,” Carlinsky's letter said.
He said Delta must retain numerous documents, including those describing its IT infrastructure, its IT business continuity plans and the way it has handled outages over the past five years.
CrowdStrike's contractual liability is proscribed to a single-digit million amount, the letter said. Delta didn’t comment on the letter on Sunday evening. In a separate statement, CrowdStrike said it hoped “that Delta will agree to work cooperatively to find a solution.”
“We've done everything we can to take care of our customers during this period,” Bastian said in an interview with CNBC's “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “If you want to have access, priority access, to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you have to test these things. You can't go into a mission-critical 24/7 operation and tell us we have a bug. That doesn't work.”
In a preliminary report following the incident, CrowdStrike announced that it will release future software updates steadily.
On July 30, CrowdStrike shareholders filed a lawsuit against the corporate in a federal court in Texas, in search of damages for the decline of their investments.
CrowdStrike will announce its second quarter results on August 28.
A Microsoft spokesperson didn’t immediately reply to CNBC's request for comment.
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