Microsoft fired back at Delta Airlines on Tuesday, accusing the airline of failing to upgrade its technology before cancelling 1000’s of flights within the wake of last month's massive global IT outage.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC last week that the airline had “no choice” but to hunt damages from Microsoft and CrowdStrike for the mass disruptions that cost the corporate, an airline that prides itself on its reliability, around $500 million.
Delta has struggled greater than rival airlines to get better from the outage, with greater than 5,000 flights canceled in the times following the July 19 incident, which was triggered by a botched software update from CrowdStrike and affected tens of millions of computers running Microsoft Windows.
Mark Cheffo, a partner at Dechert who represents Microsoft, said in a letter Tuesday to Delta's attorney David Boies of Boies Schiller Flexner that Microsoft continues to be attempting to work out why American Airlines, United Airlines and others were in a position to get better faster than Delta.
“Our preliminary review indicates that, unlike its competitors, Delta appears to have failed to modernize its IT infrastructure, either for the benefit of its customers or for the benefit of its pilots and flight attendants,” Cheffo wrote.
Delta responded on Tuesday that the corporate “has a long track record of investing in safe, reliable and high-quality service for our customers and employees.”
“Since 2016, Delta has invested billions of dollars in IT investments, in addition to the billions spent annually on IT operating costs,” Delta said in response to Microsoft's letter on Tuesday, the airline said in an announcement.
In a July 29 letter, Boies told Microsoft's general counsel, Hossein Nowbar: “We have reason to believe that Microsoft failed to meet contractual requirements and otherwise acted with gross negligence, even willful intent, in connection with the faulty CrowdStrike update that caused Windows computers to crash,” Boies told Microsoft's general counsel, Hossein Nowbar, in a July 29 letter.
Microsoft attorney Cheffo wrote in his response that the corporate sympathizes with Delta and its customers regarding the impact of the CrowdStrike incident. “But your letter and Delta's public comments are incomplete, false, misleading, and damaging to Microsoft and its reputation,” he said.
Microsoft's letter followed an analogous letter from CrowdStrike on Sunday denying the Atlanta-based airline's claims. Cheffo wrote that Microsoft offered to assist Delta without spending a dime. Every day from July 19 to July 23, Microsoft employees said they might help, but Delta turned them away, the letter said.
Delta CEO Bastian told CNBC's “Squawk Box” that while CrowdStrike didn’t offer financial compensation, it did provide “free advice” on tips on how to cope with the implications of the ability outage.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent Bastian an email, “who never responded,” Cheffo wrote Tuesday. CrowdStrike also said CEO George Kurtz reached out to his counterpart at Delta “but received no response.”
Cheffo described a July 22 letter from Microsoft to a Delta worker offering help. The Delta worker responded, “All good. Cool, I'll let you know and thank you.”
Delta executives said the outage, which resulted in additional cancellations than all of 2019, overwhelmed the crew scheduling platform that assigns crews to flights. But Cheffo said Delta doesn’t depend on Windows or Microsoft's Azure cloud services.
In 2021, IBM announced a Multi-year contract with Delta to implement a hybrid cloud architecture based on Red Hat’s OpenShift software. In 2022, Amazon said Delta had chosen the digital commerce company's Amazon Web Services unit as its preferred cloud provider.
“It quickly becomes clear that Delta likely declined Microsoft's help because the IT system it had the most trouble restoring – the crew tracking and scheduling system – was maintained by other technology vendors such as IBM because it runs on those vendors' systems, not Microsoft Windows or Azure,” Cheffo wrote in his letter.
Bastian said Delta needed to manually reset 40,000 servers last week.
Microsoft requires Delta to maintain records of what number of technologies IBM, Amazon and others contributed to the airline's problems from July 19 to 24, Cheffo wrote. Spokespeople for IBM and Amazon initially declined to comment.
Bastian told CNBC last week: “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.”
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