by David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Delta Air Lines sued cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike (NASDAQ:) in a Georgia state court on Friday after a global outage in July that caused mass flight cancellations, disrupted the travel plans of 1.3 million customers and cost the carrier more than 500 million dollars.
Delta’s lawsuit filed in Fulton County Superior Court called CrowdStrike’s faulty software update “catastrophic” and said the company “forced untested and defective updates on its customers, resulting in more than 8.5 million Microsoft (NASDAQ:) computers running Windows around the world has stopped working. crash.”
The July 19 incident led to flight cancellations around the world and hit industries around the world, including banks, health care, media companies and hotel chains.
“Delta’s claims are based on debunked misinformation, demonstrate a lack of understanding of how modern cybersecurity works, and reflect a desperate attempt to shift the blame for the company’s slow recovery to its failure to modernize outdated IT infrastructure,” CrowdStrike said tardy Friday.
Delta, which says it has been purchasing CrowdStrike products since 2022, said the outage forced it to cancel 7,000 flights, affecting 1.3 million passengers over five days.
Delta said CrowdStrike is responsible for more than $500 million in ongoing losses, as well as an unspecified amount of lost profits and expenses, including attorneys’ fees and “reputational harm and future loss of revenue.”
The incident prompted the U.S. Department of Transportation to open an investigation.
“If CrowdStrike had tested the defective update on even one computer before deployment, the computer would have crashed,” Delta’s lawsuit says. “Because a faulty update couldn’t
be removed remotely, CrowdStrike has crippled Delta’s operations and caused massive delays for Delta customers.”
Delta said that as part of its IT and infrastructure planning, it has invested billions of dollars “in licensing and building some of the best technology solutions in the airline industry.” CrowdStrike questions why Delta performed so much worse than other airlines and said it had minimal liability, a claim Delta rejected.
Last month, a senior executive at CrowdStrike apologized to Congress for a faulty software update.
Adam Meyers, senior vice president at CrowdStrike, said the company released a content configuration update to its Falcon Sensor security software that caused systems to crash around the world. “We are very sorry that this happened and we are committed to preventing events like this from happening in the future,” Meyers said.
