Delta sues CrowdStrike over outage leading to mass flight cancellations

Delta Air Lines filed a lawsuit Friday against cybersecurity software company CrowdStrike, pointing to the global tech outage in July that caused flight disruptions and significant profit loss for the airline.

The filing comes just months after an update to the software caused computers running the Windows software to crash — affecting not just the airline industry, but also took broadcasters off the air and even had “limited” impacts on the Paris Olympics over the summer. Delta officials said the outage cost the company roughly $500 million.

The complaint, filed in a Georgia state court, alleges that CrowdStrikes's software update had "forced untested and faulty updates to its customers, causing more than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-based computers around the world to crash."

The filing also comes after months of back-and-forth between the two companies.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian had threatened to sue the company for what he labeled as millions in lost revenue and thousands of canceled flights. Though, a lawyer for the software company had said the liability should be less than $10 million.

CrowdStrike also accused Delta of offering a “misleading narrative” about the tech outage. In a letter shared with The Hill, addressed to Delta’s lawyer David Boies, company lawyer Michael Carlinsky said that the airline’s threat of a lawsuit has “contributed to a misleading narrative that the software company is responsible for Delta’s IT decisions and response to the outage.”

He also noted that CrowdStrike was “highly disappointed” that Delta accused the company of acting inappropriately, noting the company's apology after the outage.

In response to a request for comment, Delta said CrowdStrike "took shortcuts," alleging that the company "exploited an unauthorized door within" the Microsoft system.

"While CrowdStrike has sought to characterize its actions as simple learning opportunities, the reality is CrowdStrike took shortcuts, circumvented certifications, and intentionally created and exploited an unauthorized door within the Microsoft operating system through which it deployed the faulty update," Delta said in the statement.

The airline added that CrowdStrike had also "failed to adhere to even basic industry-standard practices for IT updates."

The Hill has contacted CrowdStrike for comment.

The Associated Press contributed.