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The CrowdStrike outage hit Delta right where it hurts—the pocketbook.
Ed Bastian, Delta’s chief executive, said the July 19 global IT outage will cost the airline $500 million, CNBC reported. That figure includes lost revenue and costs Delta incurred to compensate stranded customers and put them up in hotels, according to Bastian.
“It was terrible,” Bastian said, describing the outage and fallout to CNBC in an interview. “Apologies again to our customers, our people…It was just a really, really tough situation.”
Even with its systems back online, Delta’s troubles appear to be far from over. The Department of Transportation announced it has opened an investigation “to ensure they comply with our passenger protection laws.”
Delta has hired a law firm “to seek damages from…CrowdStrike and Microsoft,” according to CNN. Microsoft’s systems also short-circuited during the IT disruption. “We have no choice” but to sue the companies, Bastian told CNBC.
Not all airlines were as deeply affected by the outage as Delta. For instance, David Seymour, COO of American Airlines, said during a recent earnings call that his company was back to normal by the end of the day on July 19.
“Within an hour of that outage, we assembled the right operating teams and IT experts to develop and execute a plan to get our systems back online and the aircraft moving again,” Seymour said.
Bastian asserted that Delta is “by far” the most heavily involved airline with both Microsoft and CrowdStrike, which means “we got hit the hardest.”