Delta CEO praises Apple after Microsoft Windows outage cost him $500 million

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“When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian asked in an interview with CNBC after the CrowdStrike update caused an outage for companies using Microsoft computers.

After the July 19 outage, Delta had to cancel more than 5,000 flights that weekend, compensate affected customers, and “physically touch and reset” more than 40,000 servers affected by the issue. Now, Bastian calls its partnership with Microsoft as “probably the most fragile platform,” as big tech companies are building the future with generative AI, but they can’t forget to “fortify the current” technologies.

What makes this interview more interesting is that CrowdStrike is only offering “free consulting advice” after that outage. Delta wasn’t among the companies receiving a $10 Uber Eats card as compensation.

Jokes aside, this issue might lead to a class action lawsuit against CrowdStrike. According to Reuters, its shareholders filed a proposed lawsuit due to “false and misleading” comments by the company’s CEO George Kurtz about the software being “validated, tested, and certified.” The shareholders say CrowdStrike wasn’t performing the same level of testing on Rapid Response Content updates as it did with other updates.

While Delta’s CEO has praised Apple, there’s a fundamental difference between Microsoft and Cupertino. To The Wall Street Journal, a Microsoft spokesperson said it “cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understating it reached with the European Commission following a complaint.” This complaint was that Microsoft was restricting kernel access to third-party developers.

While the Redmond company needs to give third-party developers access, Apple is following the opposite route as it’s been restricting access to third-party developers to the kernel of macOS.

That said, Apple also experiences their own outages. Although not as severe as this one, it’s hard to compare Microsoft corporative usage with Apple.

Could this issue lead to more companies adopting Apple for Work practices? The Underdogs believe Apple ecosystem is more than enough for their needs.