CrowdStrike denied that the cybersecurity giant was responsible for Delta’s prolonged flight delays following the July 19 global outage and said it would “respond aggressively” if the carrier took legal action.
The company pushed back after Delta CEO Ed Bastian last week blamed CrowdStrike for the airline’s $500 million loss and threatened to sue over the debacle.
In a letter to Delta’s legal counsel Sunday, the company said it was “highly disappointed by Delta’s suggestion that CrowdStrike acted inappropriately and strongly rejects any allegation that it was grossly negligent or committed misconduct.”
“Should Delta pursue this path, Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions — swiftly, transparently, and constructively — while Delta did not,” the letter added.
It was addressed to David Boies, a high-profile attorney reportedly hired to represent Delta and seek compensation from CrowdStrike.
“Public posturing about potentially bringing a meritless lawsuit against CrowdStrike as a long-time partner is not constructive to any party,” a lawyer for the cybersecurity firm told The Post in a statement Monday.
The Post reached out to Delta for comment.
Delta canceled more than 6,000 flights over a six-day period after a faulty CrowdStrike update caused millions of Windows-powered systems to crash worldwide – stopping airline, hospital and other industries in their tracks.
During an interview last week, Bastian said the outage cost Delta “half a billion dollars in five days.”
He said Delta would be seeking damages from CrowdStrike as a result of the losses — damages that one CNBC panelist pointed out could be enough to wipe out the cybersecurity company.
“We have no choice,” Bastian told CNBC.
CrowdStrike said its liability was capped in the single-digit millions.
Bastian also insisted that CrowdStrike had offered no help besides “free consulting advice.,”
The company denied the claim in its letter, saying “CrowdStrike’s CEO personally reached out to Delta’s CEO to offer onsite assistance, but received no response.”
Delta’s flight delays affected 500,000 passengers. The carrier took longer than any other major airline to bounce back.
The Atlanta-based airline currently faces a US Department of Transportation investigation looking into why the company took so long to recover.
Bastian said the company had to manually reset 40,000 computers after the outage.
“It was terrible,” Bastian said. “We are by far the heaviest in the industry with both [Microsoft and CrowdStrike], and so we got hit the hardest in terms of the recovery ability.”
But CrowdStrike said it was unfair for Delta to shift the blame away.
It questioned why Delta took longer than its competitors to restore operations and why Delta turned down onsite help from CrowdStrike professionals.
The letter said the carrier’s threat of a lawsuit “contributed to a misleading narrative that CrowdStrike is responsible for Delta’s IT decisions and response to the outage.”
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