A Delta Airlines plane parks at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on June 19, 2024 in Seattle, Washington.
Kent Nishimura | Getty Images
Microsoft Fight back Delta Airlines He criticized the airline on Tuesday for failing to modernize its technology before canceling thousands of flights following last month’s massive global IT outage.
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC last week that the company had “no choice” but to seek damages from Microsoft. Crowdstrike He said the company, which prides itself on reliability, lost about $500 million in the massive disruption.
Delta Air Lines had a harder time recovering than its rivals, cancelling more than 5,000 flights within days of the July 19 outage that was triggered by a botched CrowdStrike software update that affected millions of computers running Microsoft Windows.
Mark Cheffo, a partner at Dechert LLP who is representing Microsoft, said in a letter Tuesday to Delta’s lawyer, David Boies of Boies Schiller Flexner, that Microsoft is still trying to figure out why. American Airlines, United Airlines Other airlines were able to recover quicker than Delta.
“Based on our preliminary findings, Delta, unlike its competitors, does not appear to be modernizing its IT infrastructure for the benefit of its customers, pilots and flight attendants.” Cheffo wrote.
Delta Air Lines responded on Tuesday that it has a “long track record of investing in safe, reliable and quality service for our customers and employees.”
“Delta spends billions of dollars annually on IT operational costs and has invested billions more in IT capital expenditures since 2016,” the airline said in a statement in response to Tuesday’s letter from Microsoft.
“We have reason to believe that Microsoft has failed to comply with its contractual obligations or has acted grossly negligently, i.e. willfully, with respect to the flawed update from CrowdStrike that caused Windows computers to crash,” Boyce wrote to Microsoft Chief Legal Officer Hossein Nauber in a July 29 letter.
In his response, Microsoft lawyer Chefffo wrote that the company sympathizes with Delta and its customers over the impact of the CrowdStrike incident, “but your letter and Delta’s public comments are incomplete, false and misleading, and harm Microsoft and its reputation,” he said.
Microsoft’s letter follows a similar one from CrowdStrike on Sunday that denied the Atlanta-based airline’s claims. Cheffo wrote that Microsoft offered to help Delta at no cost. Every day from July 19 to 23, Microsoft employees said they could help, but Delta refused, according to the letter.
Delta Air Lines CEO Bastian told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that CrowdStrike did not offer financial compensation but provided “pro bono consulting advice” on dealing with the impact of the outage.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Bastian but “received no response,” Cheffo wrote Tuesday. CrowdStrike also said its CEO, George Kurtz, reached out to his colleagues at Delta but “received no response.”
Cheffo described a letter Microsoft sent to Delta employees on July 22 offering assistance, to which the Delta employee replied, “We’re OK. Cool will be in touch. Thank you.”
Delta executives said the outage, which led to more cancellations than all of 2019, put strain on its crew scheduling platform, which matches flights with crew members. But Cheffo said Delta is not reliant on Windows or Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.
In 2021, IBM announced a multi-year agreement with Delta Airlines to help it implement a hybrid cloud architecture running on Red Hat’s OpenShift software. In 2022, Amazon announced that Delta Airlines had selected its Amazon Web Services division as its preferred cloud provider.
“It is rapidly becoming clear that Delta Air Lines’ refusal to accept Microsoft’s assistance was likely due to the fact that the IT system it was having the most difficulty recovering – its crew tracking and scheduling system – was not serviced by Microsoft Windows or Azure, but by other technology providers, such as IBM,” Cheffo wrote in the letter.
Bastian said last week that Delta had to manually reset 40,000 servers.
Microsoft to Delta IBM, Amazon Spokespeople for IBM and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“If you want priority access to the Delta ecosystem on the technology side, you have to test this stuff. You can’t just go into a mission-critical operation that runs 24/7 and say there’s a bug. That’s not going to work,” Bastian told CNBC last week.
