Delta Air Lines criticized the company CrowdStrike, which became the culprit of global IT infrastructure failures. CrowdStrike said it offered assistance to the airline but received no response, The Register reported. The Delta chief claims the offer of help was small and came too late, and is now trying to “blame the victim” in the letter.
Last month, CrowdStrike released a flawed update to its Falcon security software, causing BSOD on more than 8 million Windows systems. In the case of Delta, according to company lawyers, the problem affected more than 37 thousand computers, disrupting the plans of more than 1.3 million passengers. Delta subsequently threatened to sue CrowdStrike and Microsoft, saying the incident cost it $500 million in losses. Representatives of potential defendants have already stated that they offered assistance to the company, but did not receive a response.
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In a letter from CrowdStrike to Delta, the software developer accused the airline of the fact that it was the actions of its specialists that led to such large-scale consequences; Microsoft also sent a text with similar content, accusing Delta of using outdated IT solutions. The airline believes that it is in no way responsible for the malfunctioning software, let alone the failure of other systems around the world. CrowdStrike is now facing a class action lawsuit from investors.
During the bickering, interesting details emerged. By the time the head of CrowdStrike contacted the head of Delta (once on the night of July 22), almost four days had passed since the incident and Delta had restored its critical systems and most other computers. The company said the offer of help came “too late” and the phone call was “unhelpful and ill-timed.” Delta denied that the software developer allegedly worked “tirelessly” to try to restore Delta’s systems.
Moreover, it is alleged that after Windows computers began to go offline around the world, CrowdStrike did not take immediate action and did not properly assess the scale and impact of the outage. And the only help in the first 65 hours after the incident was a link to a public website with advice to manually reboot the affected PCs and delete the faulty files. To make matters worse, the July 21 automated fix update itself contained an additional bug that prevented many machines from working without additional intervention.
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Delta talks about billions of dollars invested in IT solutions, and the reason for the protracted recovery of IT systems was that the company relied too much on CrowdStrike and Microsoft. In particular, it is reported that approximately 60% of Delta’s mission-critical applications and associated data, including backup systems, depend on Windows and Falcon. Trust in software manufacturers has played a cruel joke.
CrowdStrike responded by saying Delta is persistently promoting a misleading narrative. It is alleged that George Kurtz called an airline representative within four hours of the July 19 incident, and the developer’s security chief made direct contact with Delta colleagues within hours of the incident. However, teams from both companies were working closely together within hours, with CrowdStrike providing much more support than just a link to a website with basic information.
In circumstantial evidence, one of Delta’s board members posted a statement on LinkedIn saying that the CrowdStrike CEO and his team did an incredible job working around the clock in difficult conditions to fix the problems. Delta declined to comment further, but after words of gratitude, it will certainly be more difficult to sue those responsible for the incident. In the letter, CrowdStrike again called on Delta to stop trying to avoid responsibility and to tell customers and shareholders everything that is known about the incident, prior decisions and the actions taken.