Delta Air Lines filed a lawsuit against it on Friday CrowdStrike in Georgia, accusing the safety software provider of breach of contract and negligence after an outage in July crashed hundreds of thousands of computers and canceled 7,000 flights.
Other airlines recovered more quickly than Atlanta-based Delta, which said the incident reduced revenue by $380 million and price $170 million. The faulty software update affected computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Days after the outage, Delta hired David Boies of the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner to hunt damages from CrowdStrike Microsoft. Delta sought compensatory damages to cover its losses, in addition to legal 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,” Delta said in its criticism. “If CrowdStrike had even tested the flawed update on one computer before deploying it, the computer would have crashed.”
Delta had disabled CrowdStrike's automatic updates, nevertheless it still reached its computers, the airline's lawsuit said. Delta claimed that CrowdStrike's Falcon software created and exploited an unauthorized door in Windows that the airline said it could never have allowed.
“The chaos that has been created deserves, in my opinion, full compensation,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in an interview with CNBC earlier this month.
CEO George Kurtz has apologized for the incident and the corporate has committed to changing its practices to forestall similar events. In August, CrowdStrike lowered its full-year guidance attributable to a customer commitment package related to the outage.
“While we pursued a customer-first business solution, Delta chose a different path,” a CrowdStrike spokesperson told CNBC in an email. “Delta’s claims are based on debunked misinformation, demonstrate a lack of understanding of how modern cybersecurity works, and reflect a desperate attempt to shift blame for Delta’s slow recovery onto its failure to modernize its aging IT infrastructure.”
At a summit in September, Microsoft discussed various possible improvements with CrowdStrike and other endpoint security software providers.
REGARD: Delta is pushing back against CrowdStrike, saying the outage cost $380 million in revenue
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