Delta Sues CrowdStrike over Software that Melted the Internet, Caused Mass Flight Disruptions

Delta Air Lines has filed a lawsuit against cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in a Georgia state court, seeking over $500 million in damages related to the global outage in July caused by a faulty update that led to widespread flight cancellations and disrupted travel plans for 1.3 million customers.

Reuters reports that in a lawsuit filed on Friday in Fulton County Superior Court, Delta Air Lines has accused cybersecurity company CrowdStrike of providing a faulty software update that caused a catastrophic global outage in July, resulting in the cancellation of 7,000 flights and disrupting the travel plans of 1.3 million passengers over a five-day period. The airline claimed that the incident cost them more than $500 million in out-of-pocket losses and an unspecified amount in lost profits, expenditures, reputational harm, and potential future revenue loss.

According to the lawsuit, CrowdStrike “forced untested and faulty updates to its customers, causing more than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-based computers around the world to crash.” Delta, which has been a customer of CrowdStrike since 2022, stated that if the cybersecurity firm had tested the update on even a single computer before deployment, the issue would have been identified, as the faulty update could not be removed remotely.

In response to the lawsuit, CrowdStrike rejected Delta’s claims, stating that they were based on “disproven misinformation” and demonstrated a “lack of understanding of how modern cybersecurity works.” The company further accused Delta of attempting to shift blame for its slow recovery away from its failure to modernize its outdated IT infrastructure.

The incident, which occurred on July 19, not only affected Delta but also impacted various industries worldwide, including banks, healthcare, media companies, and hotel chains. The U.S. Transportation Department has opened an investigation into the matter.

Delta emphasized that it has invested billions of dollars in licensing and building some of the best technology solutions in the airline industry as part of its IT-planning and infrastructure. The airline also rejected CrowdStrike’s suggestion that it had minimal liability for the incident.

Last month, Adam Meyers, a senior vice president at CrowdStrike, apologized before Congress for the faulty software update. Meyers acknowledged that the company had released a content configuration update for its Falcon Sensor security software that resulted in system crashes worldwide and expressed the company’s determination to prevent such incidents from happening again.