Delta Air Lines is seeking substantial compensation from two major technology firms over a $500 million loss due to a global computer outage on July 19, its chief executive said Wednesday.
“We have no choice,” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC about possible lawsuits over the damages.
Bastian stressed that the global blackout cost the company a total of “500 million dollars in a period of five days,” including “loss of income, but also tens of millions of dollars a day in compensation and hotel costs” for passengers who were unable to board their planes.
“We’re trying to make sure that we’re compensated however they decide for what they’ve cost us,” he said, referring to US companies Microsoft and CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm at the center of a global computer blackout that affected airports, hospitals, media outlets, banks and many other services in several countries, said the outage was due to a bug in its testing software, Falcon.
The flaw spread to millions of computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system, the world’s most popular. The group said 8.5 million devices running the program were affected, or nearly 1 percent of computers running it.
An estimated 40,000 Delta servers had to be manually restored to service after the outage.
“If you have priority access to Delta’s internal system in terms of technology, you have to test things. You can’t go into a critical operation 24/7 and say ‘we have a bug, something’s not working,'” Bastian said.
Source: AFP