The carrier says it was "surprised and disappointed" to hear the cybersecurity firm try to disperse fault
Delta Air Lines has issued a response to CrowdStrike $CRWD’s attempt to share some of the blame for the CrowdStrike technology outage. In a letter shared with Quartz, the carrier said that the cybersecurity firm should take more responsibility for what turned out to be an extremely costly problem.
“We were surprised and disappointed by CrowdStrike’s efforts to minimize the international disaster it caused (including by seeking to downgrade it to an ‘incident’ or an ‘outage’),” Delta said, adding that it is “still working to understand the full extent of what CrowdStrike did (and didn’t do) that resulted in the disaster that everyone in the world other than CrowdStrike seems to know occurred.”
Earlier this week, CrowdStrike said it “rejects any allegation that it was grossly negligent or committed willful misconduct” after a software update it pushed out threw airports and airlines around the world into chaos. Delta had a harder time getting back to business-as-usual than other airlines and ended up spending $500 million on compensation for workers and customers.
Both CrowdStrike and Microsoft $MSFT, which has also been a part of the fracas, say that Delta ignored offers of on-site help. But in a securities filing, Delta says that it and their high-powered lawyer David Boies are taking them to court anyway.
“We are pursuing legal claims against CrowdStrike and Microsoft to recover damages caused by the outage,” CEO Ed Bastian said in a statement in the filing.
Speaking to CNBC last week, Bastian said it wasn’t the kind of situation where an apology would suffice.
“We have no choice, between not just the lost revenue, but the tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels,” he said. “We did everything we could to take care of our customers over that period.”
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