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Remember the CrowdStrike update that sparked a global IT outage in July? The one where thousands of flights were canceled, and general chaos ensued?
Delta Airlines sure does.
“We had 86 great days, and we had five days that were impacted, caused by CrowdStrike,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian told Yahoo Finance, as the company reported Q3 earnings that missed Wall Street estimates. “People know that. That was not something that was attributable to our business or our performance, it was something that was done to us.”
The CrowdStrike outage amounted to a $380 million revenue hit for Delta, “primarily driven by refunding customers for cancelled flights and providing customer compensation in the form of cash and SkyMiles,” the company said.
“The havoc that was created deserves, in my opinion, to be fully compensated for,” Bastian told CNBC. Delta has previously stated it plans to pursue compensation from CrowdStrike and Microsoft, whose computer systems crashed as a result of CrowdStrike’s software update. “This matter is now in the hands of our attorneys. We hope that we’ll see a resolution but we keep all of our options open,” he continued.
Not that Delta is exactly struggling right now. For Q3, the company reported $14.6 billion in revenue. Delta expects Q4 revenue to climb between 2% and 4% compared to last year, thanks to capacity growth.
Still, there’s some uncertainty ahead. Delta expects the upcoming US presidential election to trim one percentage point from total unit revenue in Q4, which is worse than some analyst estimates, per Reuters.
“We do anticipate seeing a little choppiness around the election, which we’ve seen in past national elections,” Bastian told CNBC. “Consumers will, I think, take a little bit of pause in making investment decisions, whether it’s discretionary or other things. I think you’re going to hear other industries talking about that as well.”