Delta Air Lines on Thursday said the last month CrowdStrike The cancellation and the next mass cancellations of flights cost the corporate around 550 million US dollars and confirmed that it’s pursuing claims for damages against the corporate and Microsoft.
The financial impact features a $380 million decline in revenue in the present quarter, “primarily due to refunds for canceled flights and the payment of compensation in the form of cash and SkyMiles,” the Atlanta-based airline said in a securities filing.
The incident, which resulted in around 7,000 flights being cancelled, also resulted in costs of $170 million “related to the technology-related outage and subsequent restoration of operations,” the airline said, adding that its fuel bill would likely be $50 million lower on account of the cancelled flights.
Delta has struggled greater than its competitors to recuperate from the July 19 outage that took thousands and thousands of Windows-based computers offline worldwide. The outages occurred at the peak of the summer travel season and resulted in strandings Thousands of Delta customers, a rare occurrence for the airline that markets itself as a premium carrier that receives top marks for its reliability.
“A disruption of this length and magnitude is unacceptable, and our customers and employees deserve better,” CEO Ed Bastian said within the filing. “Since the incident, our people have returned operations to an industry-leading position consistent with the level of performance our customers expect from Delta.”
The variety of Delta flight cancellations in the times following the outage was higher than in all of 2019. The U.S. Department of Transportation said last month that it was investigating Delta's response to the outage and flight cancellations.
CrowdStrike responded in a press release Thursday that Delta “continues to spread a misleading narrative” and said the corporate's top security officer was “in direct contact” with Delta's chief information and security officer “within hours of the incident to provide information and offer assistance.”
In a letter to CrowdStrike's attorney on Thursday, Delta's attorney David Boies said 1.3 million customers were affected by the outage and 37,000 Delta computers were shut down.
Lawyers for CrowdStrike and Microsoft fired back earlier this week, saying they’d offered to assist Delta. Microsoft suggested on Wednesday that Delta had not invested enough in its technology in comparison with its competitors.
“If CrowdStrike truly wants to avoid a lawsuit from Delta, it must accept real responsibility for its actions and compensate Delta for the serious harm it has caused to Delta's business, reputation and goodwill,” Boies said within the letter to CrowdStrike on Thursday.
About 60 percent of Delta's “mission-critical applications” and their data rely upon Microsoft and CrowdStrike, he said, adding that the outage “required significant human intervention by experienced crew specialists to get Delta's employees and aircraft to the right locations to resume normal, safe operations.”
image credit : www.cnbc.com