US airline Delta claims $500 million in damages after major IT failure in CrowdStrike software.
US airline Delta is accusing CrowdStrike of breach of contract and negligence following an outage that took down more than eight million computers worldwide and led to 7,000 canceled flights at Delta. The company is seeking $500 million in damages, CNCB knows.
Error of faulty software update
Because of the outage, Delta lost $380 million in revenue, and additional costs reached $170 million. The airline is suing both CrowdStrike and Microsoft in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. state of Georgia. Delta claims the software update was not tested thoroughly enough. CrowdStrike’s automatic updates had been preemptively disabled, but the update was still performed, which Delta says can only be done through an unauthorized backdoor in Windows.
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7,000 flights canceled due to IT failure: Delta launches lawsuit against CrowdStrike
In a response, CrowdStrike said those allegations are false. “They are based on faulty information and that indicates a lack of understanding of modern cybersecurity. This is nothing more than a desperate attempt to avoid having to pin the blame on their outdated IT infrastructure,” said a CrowdStrike spokesperson.
CrowdStrike’s automated testing procedure allowed the update to roll out in July, but overlooked a logical flaw that caused system crashes. Microsoft subsequently published a recovery tool for affected Windows PCs and spoke with security industry partners to prevent such fiascos in the future.