Reuters reports that while the IT company apologized to the carrier for the problems, they stand short of accepting full blame for the incident.
CrowdStrike Says They Offered Help, But Got No Response
The CrowdStrike outage on July 19, 2024 brought down airlines and forced a ground order in order to get computer systems back running. While most airlines were able to get services back up quickly, Delta was the one carrier who struggled for days to return to normal service. The incident could end up costing the airline up to $500 million.
After the incident, leadership for Delta told CNBC they hired an outside legal firm to investigate and potentially take both CrowdStrike and Microsoft to court with the hopes of recovering some of their losses. Now CrowdStrike is firing back at those allegations.
In a letter to Delta’s external counsel, attorneys for CrowdStrike once again apologized for the outage, but claimed that the airline’s allegations were completely inaccurate. The letter states that the company is “highly disappointed by Delta’s suggestion that CrowdStrike acted inappropriately and strongly rejects any allegation that it was grossly negligent or committed misconduct.”
The letter goes on to claim that CrowdStrike’s CEO George Kurtz personally reached out to Delta chief executive Ed Bastian to offer his support during the outages, but never received a response. Moreover, the letter claims that Delta declined additional support from CrowdStrike as they worked to return to normal operations.
“Should Delta pursue this path [of litigation], Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions—swiftly, transparently, and constructively—while Delta did not,” attorney Michael Carlinsky wrote in the letter, as quoted by CNN.
No lawsuit has been filed by either party over the crash or outages at Delta Air Lines, and both parties have only made allegations towards each other’s role in Delta’s return to business. Nothing has been proven in a court of law.
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Source: frugal travel guy