A Delta Airlines Airbus A319-114 taxis to Los Angeles International Airport after arriving from Las Vegas in Los Angeles, California on May 5, 2024.
Kevin Carter |
Delta Air Lines on Thursday said the last month CrowdStrike The cancellation and the subsequent mass cancellations of flights cost the company around 550 million US dollars and confirmed that it is pursuing claims for damages against the company and Microsoft.
The financial impact includes a $380 million decline in revenue in the current quarter, “primarily due to the refund of 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 due to the cancelled flights.
Delta has struggled more than its competitors to recover from the July 19 outage that took millions of Windows-based computers offline worldwide. The outages occurred at the height 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 in 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 number of Delta flight cancellations in the days 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 statement Thursday that Delta “continues to spread a misleading narrative” and said the company'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 had offered to help Delta. Microsoft suggested on Wednesday that Delta had not invested enough in its technology compared to 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 in the letter to CrowdStrike on Thursday.
About 60 percent of Delta's “mission-critical applications” and their data depend on 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.”
Comments are closed.