Microsoft responds to Delta after outage, says airline refused help

Microsoft shot back at Delta Air Lines on Tuesday after the carrier said it would seek damages from the software giant and CrowdStrike for thousands of flight cancellations after a massive IT outage.

Delta struggled more than rival airlines to recover from the outage, canceling more than 5,000 flights in the days after the July 19 incident, which was caused by a botched software update by CrowdStrike and affected millions of operating computers Microsoft Windows. It cost the carrier about $500 million, CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last week.

Bastian said the Atlanta-based airline, which prides itself on punctuality and positions itself as a premium airline, has “no choice” but to pursue legal action against the two technology companies.

Mark Cheffo, a Dechert partner representing Microsoft, sent a letter Tuesday to attorney David Boies of Boies Schiller Flexner. Boies represents Delta and had sent letters on behalf of the airline to CrowdStrike and Microsoft.

“We have reason to believe that Microsoft did not meet contractual requirements and otherwise acted in a grossly negligent manner, indeed willfully, with respect to the faulty Update” by CrowdStrike that caused Windows computers to crash, Boies told the official Microsoft’s chief legal officer, Hossein. Nowbar, in a letter on July 29.

Cheffo wrote in his response that Microsoft empathizes with Delta and its customers for 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,” he said.

The response is similar to CrowdStrike’s letter on Sunday refuting Delta’s claims. Cheffo wrote that Microsoft offered to help Delta for free. Every day from July 19 to July 23, Microsoft employees said they could help, but Delta turned them away, according to the letter.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Bastian, “who has never responded,” Cheffo wrote. CrowdStrike also said CEO George Kurtz had reached out to his counterpart at Delta “but received no response.”

Cheffo described a July 22 letter from Microsoft offering assistance to a Delta employee. The Delta employee shot back, “Okay. Cool will let you know and thank you.”

Delta executives said the outage, which led to more cancellations than in all of 2019, overwhelmed its crew scheduling platform that matches crews with flights. But Cheffo said Delta doesn’t rely on Windows or Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.

In 2021, IBM announced a multi-year deal with Delta to help the airline implement a hybrid-cloud architecture that runs on Red Hat’s OpenShift software. In 2022, Amazon said Delta had chosen the digital commerce company’s Amazon Web Services unit as its preferred cloud provider.

“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 technology providers , like IBM, because it works on those providers.” systems, and not Microsoft Windows or Azure.”

Bastian said last week Delta had to manually reset 40,000 servers.

Microsoft requires Delta to maintain records showing how many technologies from IBM, Amazon and others contributed to the airline’s issues from July 19 to July 24, Cheffo wrote. Spokesmen for IBM and Amazon did not immediately provide comment.

Cheffo said Microsoft is still trying to figure out why American Airlines, United Airlines and others were able to recover faster than Delta.

“Our preliminary review suggests that Delta, unlike its competitors, apparently has not modernized its IT infrastructure, either for the benefit of its customers or its pilots and flight attendants,” Cheffo wrote.

Delta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bastian told CNBC last week, “If you’re going to have priority access to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you have to test these things. You can’t go into a mission critical 24/7 operation and tell us that we have an error.