Microsoft has responded to Delta Air Lines’ criticism of Windows and CrowdStrike following last month’s massive IT outage. Delta CEO Ed Bastian wants compensation from both CrowdStrike and Microsoft for the roughly $500 million Delta lost due to the outage. Now, Microsoft says Delta refused its free help on multiple occasions and even ignored an email from CEO Satya Nadella to Bastian.
“Microsoft stands in solidarity with Delta and its customers regarding the impact of the CrowdStrike incident. But your letter and Delta’s public comments are incomplete, false, misleading and damaging to Microsoft and its reputation,” said Mark Cheffo, co-chair of Dechert’s global litigation practice, in a letter sent on behalf of Microsoft to Delta’s attorneys.
The letter, included below, purports to paint a very different picture of the incident following Bastian's comments in a Interview with CNBC Last week, Bastian called Microsoft fragile, asking: “When was the last time you heard of a major service outage at Apple?” He also revealed that more than 40,000 of the company’s servers had been affected by the faulty CrowdStrike update. However, Microsoft’s letter suggests that Delta’s problems could run much deeper than the Windows service outage.
“Although Microsoft’s software had not caused the CrowdStrike incident, Microsoft immediately stepped in and offered to assist Delta free of charge after the service outage on July 19,” Cheffo’s letter says. “Each day that followed, from July 19 through July 23, Microsoft employees repeated their offers to assist Delta. Each time, Delta refused Microsoft’s offers of assistance, even though Microsoft had not charged Delta for this assistance.”
Microsoft also claims that an employee reached out to Delta on July 22 to offer any assistance the airline needed, but a Delta employee responded that everything was “fine” on the same day that Delta canceled more than 1,100 flights, followed by 500 more cancellations the next day.
“Senior Microsoft executives also repeatedly reached out to their Delta counterparts for help, again with similar results,” Cheffo writes. “Among others, on Wednesday, July 24, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent an email to Delta CEO Ed Bastian, who never responded.”
Bastian may not have received that email from Nadella because he was busy traveling to the Paris Olympics, as Delta is the official airline of Team USA. Between all the flight cancellations following the CrowdStrike outage, Delta had to hurry to meet its obligations to Team USA to get athletes to Paris on time.
Microsoft believes Delta declined its free help because it was actually having difficulty restoring non-Windows systems. “It is becoming increasingly clear that Delta likely declined Microsoft’s assistance because the IT system it was having the most trouble restoring (its crew tracking and scheduling system) was being serviced by other technology vendors, such as IBM, because it runs on those vendors’ systems and not on Microsoft Windows or Azure,” Microsoft’s letter says.
That suggests Delta was affected by the CrowdStrike service outage on its Windows systems and that those outages then affected its IT infrastructure, which was serviced by IBM and others. Microsoft says Delta “apparently has not modernized its IT infrastructure,” so it was hit harder by the CrowdStrike service outage than rivals like American Airlines or United Airlines.
Like CrowdStrike, Microsoft is also asking Delta to preserve documents related to CrowdStrike’s outage. It also wants the airline to preserve everything related to the outage of its crew tracking and scheduling systems, which are powered by a combination of technologies from IBM, Oracle, amazon Web Services, Kyndryl and others. Microsoft says it will “vigorously defend itself in any litigation if Delta decides to pursue that path.”
Earlier this week, CrowdStrike also claimed that it is not to blame for Delta's service outage that lasted several days, saying that Delta also refused its on-site assistance. CrowdStrike's comments now make more sense following Microsoft's suggestion that the problems at Delta could be much deeper than its Windows systems being affected by CrowdStrike's faulty update. Unlike other airlines, Delta struggled to get its systems back up and running and is currently being investigated by the U.S. Department of Transportation. on their management of recovery efforts.
