Microsoft has responded to Delta Air Lines’ criticism of Windows and CrowdStrike following the giant IT outage last month. Delta CEO Ed Bastian is seeking compensation from both CrowdStrike and Microsoft for the $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 empathizes 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-head of Dechert’s global litigation practice, in a letter on behalf of Microsoft to Delta’s attorneys.
The letter, embedded below, aims to paint a very different picture of the incident following Bastian’s comments in an interview with CNBC last week. Bastian called Microsoft fragile and asked, “When was the last time you heard of a major disruption at Apple?” It also revealed that more than 40,000 of the company’s servers were hit by the botched CrowdStrike update. Microsoft’s letter suggests that Delta’s problems may be much deeper than the outage of its Windows server.
“Although Microsoft software did not cause the CrowdStrike incident, Microsoft immediately stepped in and offered to assist Delta free of charge following the July 19 outage,” the letter from Cheffo said. “Each day that followed from July 19 to July 23, Microsoft employees repeated their offers to help Delta. Each time, Delta declined Microsoft’s offers to help, even though Microsoft would not have paid Delta for this help.”
Microsoft also claims that an employee contacted Delta on July 22 to offer any assistance the airline needed, but a Delta employee responded that things were “all good” the same day Delta canceled more than 1,100 flights, followed by another 500 cancellations the day after. .
“More senior Microsoft executives also repeatedly pitched in to help their counterparts at Delta, again with similar results,” Cheffo writes. Among other things, on Wednesday, July 24, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Delta CEO Ed Bastian, who has never responded.
Bastian may have missed that email from Nadella because he was busy flying to the Paris Olympics, as Delta is the official airline for Team USA. Among all the flight cancellations after the CrowdStrike outage, Delta had to scramble to meet its Team USA obligations to get the athletes to Paris on time.
Microsoft thinks Delta refused its free help because it was actually trying to restore non-Windows systems. “It is rapidly becoming clear that Delta is likely to reject Microsoft’s assistance because the IT system it had the most difficulty restoring – its crew tracking and scheduling system – was being serviced by other providers of technology, like IBM, because it works on those providers.” systems, and not Microsoft Windows or Azure,” Microsoft’s letter says.
This suggests that Delta was hit by the CrowdStrike outage on its Windows systems and that those failures then affected its IT infrastructure served by IBM and others. Microsoft says Delta “apparently has not modernized its IT infrastructure,” so it was more affected by the CrowdStrike outage than rivals such as American Airlines or United Airlines.
Like CrowdStrike, Microsoft is also asking Delta to preserve documents related to the CrowdStrike outage. It also wants the airline to retain anything related to the disruption of its crew tracking and scheduling systems, which run on a mix of IBM, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Kyndryl and other technologies. Microsoft says it will “vigorously defend itself in any litigation if Delta chooses to pursue that path.”
Earlier this week, CrowdStrike also claimed it is not to blame for Delta’s several-day outage and said Delta also refused its on-site assistance. CrowdStrike’s comments now make more sense following Microsoft’s suggestion that the problems at Delta may be much deeper than its Windows systems being wiped out by CrowdStrike’s botched update. Unlike other airlines, Delta struggled to get systems back online and is currently being investigated by the US Department of Transportation for its handling of the recovery effort.