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Delta CEO says Microsoft is "probably the most fragile platform" after it lost "half a billion dollars in five days" during the CrowdStrike outage
By Kevin Okemwa,
2024-08-02
What you need to know
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian says the CrowdStrike outage that toppled Microsoft's services cost the airline $500 million.
The executive says the incident has forced him to rethink the airline's partnership with Microsoft and CrowdStrike while touting Apple's apparent 'immunity' to repeated outages.
The airline is seeking damages amounting to $500 million from Microsoft and CrowdStrike. However, the former has only offered free IT consultation advice, while the latter touted $10 Uber Eats gift cards for those affected.
More recently, Delta CEO Ed Bastian touched base with CNBC to discuss the digital pandemic that left thousands of passengers stranded across airports. The company reportedly lost between $350 million to $500 million after approximately 7,000 people canceled their flights, coupled with 176,000 refund and reimbursement requests. Delta CEO claims the company incurred costs of more than 40,000 servers that they were forced to tamper with to rest the system.
"When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?" responded Bastian after being asked whether Delta was reconsidering its partnership with Microsoft and CrowdStrike after the massive outage. Bastian indicated Microsoft is "probably the most fragile platform."
Delta is among the first companies impacted by the massive outage to seek compensation. However, CrowdStrike shareholders have seemingly joined the fray earlier this week by filing a proposed class action (via Reuters ).
“If you’re going to have priority access to the Delta ecosystem... you’ve gotta test this stuff. You can’t come into a mission-critical, 24-7 operation and tell us, ‘We have a bug.’ It doesn’t work.”
"I have tremendous respect for Microsoft and Satya, but they are building the future and must make sure they fortify the current," says Delta CEO Ed Bastian. "We thought we had the best (fortification) between Microsoft and CrowdStrike."
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal , a Microsoft spokesman indicated the firm "cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint." However, the EU refuted the claims while speaking to The Verge and indicated, "Microsoft is free to decide on its business model and to adapt its security infrastructure to respond to threats provided this is done in line with EU competition law."
Delta's customer support is more "fragile". He really has no business casting stones, since it's his IT people's fault. They should have been able to fix this in hours, not days. This Crowdstrike outage just shows how companies need to reevaluate the stranglehold IT Security has on Companies. There's little common sense in giving Security teams the power they have when they can bring a company to its knees like this.
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